The new Pixar flick The Good Dinosaur asks: what if the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs had missed? Well, science now has a boring answer: The dinos would probably still have become extinct.
In Pixar’s upcoming The Good Dinosaur, we are asked to imagine an alternate history, telling the fictional story of what might have happened if the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs had missed the Earth. Main character Arlo (a dinosaur) keeps a human as a pet, and they go on fantastical adventures together.
Related: Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur: First full-length trailer released!
But a new scientific study reveals that everything we thought we knew about the dinosaurs’ extinction is wrong. According to the Science journal, it wasn’t just a meteorite collision that wiped out most of the Earth’s animal life 65 million years ago, but rather some extreme volcanic activity over the course of half a million years.
We — and by “we,” we mean legitimate super smart scientists — already knew that a massive volcano eruption in what is now India covered 12,275 cubic miles of the Earth’s surface with lava over the course of 500,000 years, around the same time as the meteorite struck Earth and wiped out countless lives.
And of course, many scientists have long been working under the assumption that the mass extinction happened slowly, rather than all at once. In 2011, a significant fossil find lent even more credence to the theory.
But now, the conclusion is clearer than ever. The new study proposes that while the volcanic eruption’s rapid acceleration was in part caused by the Chicxulub meteorite that struck Earth, it was in fact the climate changing gases brought on by the volcanic eruptions that eventually caused the mass extinctions that it would take the Earth millions of years to recover from, as opposed to the meteorite itself.
Says lead researcher Paul Renne in a press release (via PopSci), “Based on our dating of the lavas, we can be pretty certain that the volcanism and the impact occurred within 50,000 years of the extinction, so it becomes somewhat artificial to distinguish between them as killing mechanisms: both phenomena were clearly at work at the same time.”
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So even if the meteorite had missed Earth, there’s a possibility that the dinosaurs would have died off eventually, anyway. Of course the Earth would still have looked very different today — and it’s always fun to play with what-if scenarios!
But we guess this throws Pixar’s imaginary future theory in which dinosaurs keep humans as pets out the window (and good riddance, because this is a terrifying prospect!).