Was an asteroid the sole reason dinosaurs went extinct? According to a new study they were already ‘dying off.’

Who hasn’t heard of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? We have all essentially grown up knowing that this mysterious thing was responsible for the extinction of the powerful lizards. But what if that weren’t entirely accurate?

According to a recent, significant study, dinosaurs were ‘already dying’ when they were obliterated by the massive asteroid.

According to a study done on dinosaur eggs in China, the range of species of dinosaurs was already dramatically decreasing when they became extinct 66 million years ago.

The study, which was carried out by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has reportedly been published in the academic journal PNAS, according to Mirror UK.

It constructs a two million-year chronology toward the end of the Cretaceous period, the last time that dinosaurs were alive, using dinosaur eggs discovered in the nation’s Shanyang Basin.

Around 1,000 egg fossils were found in the central Chinese basin, but deeper inspection revealed that just three species were actually present at the time.

It indicates that during the Cretaceous epoch, dinosaur species diversity was declining.

The authors concluded that their findings ‘show low dinosaur biodiversity throughout the last two million years of the Cretaceous and that those data reflect a drop in dinosaur biodiversity millions of years before the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary.’

This may suggest that before they were wiped out by an asteroid, dinosaur populations were already in decline.

There has been speculation that the disappearance of the species was caused by a number of circumstances, including climate change and volcanic eruptions.

Events like the Deccan Traps eruption in modern-day India would have seriously harmed the food sources and maybe hastened the demise of dinosaurs.