An amazing new theory advanced by some scientists claims that dinosaurs may have been wiped out, or at least were on their way out, due to a toxic flower planet long before an asteroid finished the job. Current wisdom holds that a massive asteroid that struch the Earth about 66 million years ago caused immense destruction that led to the end of the dinos, but this study calls into question whether they would have survived anyway.

The research, published in the journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, says that the dinosaurs were already endangered due to eating a toxic plants that they did not identify as poisonous. The scientists, Michael Frederick and Gordon Gallup, found a correlation between the emergence of this plan and the decline of the dinosaurs.

Furthermore, scientists believe their lack of ability to recognize a poisonous plants exacerbated the decline. Modern species have evolved the ability to detect poison and develop and avoidance to it after becoming sick, associating the smell and taste of it with a bad reaction.

“Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to explain the worldwide extinction event that led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs,” the abstract of the paper states. “There is considerable empirical support for the well-known asteroid impact hypothesis, and volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Traps have also been implicated. Increasingly, theories involving multiple causes are being considered, yet few of these consider how the cognitive and behavioral abilities of certain classes of animals may have differed in ways that allowed some to survive while others perished. Here we advance the hypothesis along with supporting evidence that the emergence of toxic plants coupled with an inability to form learned taste aversions may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.”