"One of the remarkable things about this work is that it is a statistical smoking gun. It's in the background for all extinctions, but it's predictive about which species are more likely to survive and which will go extinct," says Shanan Peters, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.
Peters' study, published in the journal Nature, argues that it was changing sea levels that was responsible for the demise for the dinosaurs as well as other species throughout evolutionary history. The last great extinction was triggered by a fall in sea levels, but others have been caused by a rise.
Peters arrived at this conclusion by collecting rocks from 540 sites across America, The Independent newspaper said.
According to the British daily, Peters looked at two main types: carbonates, which he likens to the white sand you see in beautiful marine environments like the Bahamas, and siliciclastics, which are like the muddy sand beaches we have in the UK, dark with sediment that's been washed off the land.
"At each spot, I asked what the record of sea-level rise and fall was and what the environmental consequence of that was," Peters said.
"It doesn't mean that other physical perturbations aren't important," argued Peters, referring to super volcanoes and asteroid strikes. The ferocious dinosaurs died some 65 million years ago. The debate over the demise of the dinosaurs -- who ruled the world for 100 million years -- has been intense.
Many theories have been propounded, including that the dinosaurs were killed by the impact of an asteroid, a super volcano, or a gamma ray. They were starved, poisoned, frozen, boiled, drowned, dried, asphyxiated, irradiated or all of the above, it has been argued by scientists.