Since long we have been blaming an asteroid for the sudden and violent mass extinction of dinosaur nearly 66 million years ago. But it seems asteroid is not the only one to be blamed after a recent study revealed that massive volcanic eruptions around the same time the asteroid hit together resulted in extinction of countless species.

The study's findings presented in the journal Science join together two long-held theories about what killed the dinosaurs. The Deccan Traps in India features layers upon layers of volcanic rock and are the long-solidified remains of one of the world's truly enormous volcanic eruptions.

Lead author Paul Renne, a geochronologist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, said in a statement that the amount of lava extruded would have spread to something like half a million cubic kilometers. He said such a wide area is enough to cover the entire earth to a depth of a meter or more.

Renne and his colleagues said they wondered if these two jointly would have caused the extinction. Having such wide and massive volcanic flows at the same time of a devastating asteroid impact seemed like an unlikely coincidence, said Renne.

"What we wanted to do was sample from bottom of the pile, the middle of the pile and top of the pile -- and try and determine where, within that whole sequence, age of the impact and the extinction occurs", Renne said.

The magma welling up from the mantle showed clear evidence of having mixed with stuff in the crust. But at a certain point the lava layers after this point had fewer signs of crustal interaction.

Such a change in the nature of eruptions from frequent but small to occasional but enormous could have been brought only by the shock of the asteroid impact, he said.

"That looks like a fundamental change in the plumbing system," Renne said.

"It should hopefully inspire people not to try and bolster one or the other of the two hypotheses and quit saying, 'Well it was all impact and the volcanism had nothing to do with it,'" Renne said. "We really have to look at the two of these processes more organically than before."