"Could have", but HASN'T. Temperatures remained
at Late Cretaceous levels well into the Paleocene, then the methane
clathrates in the deep sea dissolved, and temperatures jumped up and remained
there well into the Eocene. At the end of the Eocene Antarctica iced over and
global temperatures fell, but no sooner. It is a myth that the end of the
Cretaceous is connected to any sort of cold climate.
Hey! Why did corals survive? They all need warm
water and die in cold one. Or crocodiles?
Have a look at climate and herbivore evolution
through the Cenozoic and Paleozoic. You won't find a correlation.
All wrong. There were plenty of "sea reptiles"
already in the Early Triassic when there were no dinosaurs or anything like
them.
A very important point is
that the near-simultaneous extinction of
dinosaurs and sea reptiles need not imply a common agency of extinction. The dinosaur extinction may have caused marine extinctions indirectly, made them inevitable. Generally, it is assumed that the lack of a common biological agency of extinction, on land and at sea, implies a common physical agency e.g. an asteroid. But a biological agency or agencies could have extinguished the dinosaurs AND, indirectly, the sea creatures, for the latter may have needed the dinos. This
is still not enough. There weren't just non-neornithean dinosaurs and "sea
creatures" among the victims of the K-T mass extinction. How do you (or Dr.
Starkov, or whoever) explain the fact that marsupials were decimated? That
nearly all birds died out? That 80 % or more of North American plants
disappeared within 2 cm under the iridium layer?...
I
could argue that the above hypothesis puts the cart before the horse. Let's see
it this way: We have an enormous impact crater dated at 64.98 +- 0.05 Ma (and
maybe a second one in India + the Seychelles). What happens when a planetoid 10
km across hits the earth?
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