Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/11/new-timeline-of-dino-extinctio.html
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Birds are avian dinos, yep.
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66m years is a long time. I’ve often wondered what the next intelligent life forms will find 66m years after we all kill ourselves. I assume some of us will be fossils, but will there be any evidence left of our societies? Cities? Or will it all just be ash and bones?
The roaches in 66m years: “These primitive mammals which expanded greatly after the demise of their long-lived reptilian predecessors seemed intelligent but could not properly manage the planetary resources and hence they induced their own demise in a geological blip of time”.
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“Dinosaur extinction” is an odd headline, seeing as they didn’t all go extinct.
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Makes sense. Any dinos that were standing on the ground at the time would have been knocked into space by the impact, so that just left the dinos in the air and the mammals hiding safely underground. SCIENCE.
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So what happened to the dinosaurs in mid-jump?
(I know some of them must have been jumpers, because jumping is fun.)
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They were the ones who evolved into flightless birds, of course.
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It was most likely a Monday.
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Roaches have a pretty stable niche. I can’t see natural selection shifting them too far from their present form.
Roaches in 66m years: “Oh boy! Greasy kitchens again!”
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In the psuedodocumentary, The Future is Wild, the new sapient species are squids
The counterargument
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what will they find?
Plastic. And radioactive waste.
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To paraphrase Charlie Pierce, dinosaurs died then to make us happy now. 
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That impact must have scared the Hell out of all the cavemen who … wait, what?
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Cleaning soda out of keyboard.
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Oh yeah? Then what happened to all the straws that T-Rex used? I heard they had to be super long.
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Not in 66 million years. All plastic and 99% of any human trace would be gone over 66 million years. I mean, unless humans last for 60 million years, pumping out waste and plastic all that time, I suppose?
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66 million years is long enough for even the longest-lived fission products (most importantly I-129, with a half-life of about 15 million years) go through at least couple of half-life periods. As for plastics, there will obviously be some microplastic encased in sediments and surviving in fossil form, but all the microplastic circulating in the ecosystem will be long gone by then.
A million years is a long time, and 66 My is a timespan we have a hard time comprehending even intellectually, let alone on a “gut level”.
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