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Comment by sauravt | Hacker News Reader

Here's a curious question, India merged into Eurasia ~40 million years ago, Dinosaurs became extinct around 66 million years ago. When dinosaurs were around India was still an island. We know for sure about the presence of Dinosaurs in ancient India through fossils records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajasaurus . So how did the dinosaurs populate an isolated island? Or did they evolve independently of each other in different islands?

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First dinosaurs appeared as early as 230 million years ago, when what later became India was a part of the huge continent:

http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240

India became "an island" continent only almost 100 million years later than that.

If you go back to 200 million years you'll see India firmly attached and it broke away ~150 million years ago, Dinosaurs are ~240 million years old.

Like another commentator mentioned, dinosaur started appearing ~230m years ago. If you go back ~200m years, you'll see that India, Africa and the Americas are all fused together into a supercontinent.

The preminent hypothesis for the end of the dinosaurs before the Alverezes found the meteoric Iridium layer 40 years ago was large volcanos in India poisoned the planets ecosystem.

Some geologists hold that dino extinction was caused by multiple factors including a meteor, volcanos, and a preceding general decline of the genus.

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