How did animals survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?
The survival of certain animals after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is attributed to their size and dietary habits. Smaller animals, such as some lizards and mammals, were better able to find shelter and required less food during the aftermath. Additionally, the avian ancestors of modern birds survived due to their small size and ability to fly, leading to a shift in the average size of Earth's surviving animals.
- ▪The asteroid impact 66 million years ago caused the extinction of 75% of Earth's species, including nonavian dinosaurs.
- ▪Smaller animals were more likely to survive due to their ability to find shelter and lower food requirements.
- ▪The ancestors of modern birds survived because they were small and had the ability to fly, allowing them to escape danger.
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Record
| Original publisher | Live Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.livescience.com/animals/how-did-animals-survive-the-asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T09:02:31.570Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T09:02:31.570Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | w1XKTZa_NELS |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Animals How did animals survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? It helped to have a number of features to aid survival following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. By Isabel Gil published 24 May 2026 in Features When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. An asteroid caused the demise of the nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, so how did other animals survive? (Image credit: angel_nt via Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Around 66 million years ago, a gigantic asteroid smashed into Earth and wreaked chaos globally.Superheated rock from the impact spewed into…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Live Science.
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