When I was a kid, and now that my brothers have kids, we've glided over large stretches in our presentation of the Natural History. We lead up to the Permian and its Great Dying at the end. Then there's the Dinosaur Age, in the Mesozoic. But the Mesozoic and the Dinosaur Age are not coterminous; this "middle life" era starts with the Triassic, ending in its own horrendous extinction event. Only from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous do we get dinosaur rule. Another gap is within our Caenozoic. First is the Palaeocene, after the non-bird dinosaurians all died out 65ish million years ago; but then these mammalian lifeforms got overturned by the P/E Thermal Maximum 55 mya. Eocene life is recognisably ours.
A large what-if thought experiment is, what if the meteor didn't hit Chicxulub.
For some time dinosaurians and mammals would have continued running up against one another. But what happened 55 mya might still have happened. Or maybe that asteroid would have taken a few more swings around the sun and hit us later...
Did Chicxulub rattle the innards of the earth enough to change the motion of magma-plumes? Was the 55 mya event a knock-on from that?
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