While Earth was still in its dinosaur era and edging into mammal history, Mars still had volcanic activity in the Tharsis region. That timing window overlaps with the dinosaurs’ last chapter and the early mammal boom on Earth.
A new study focused on a volcanic system south of Pavonis Mons, one of Mars’ giant shield volcanoes, and the timeline feels surprisingly recent. The oldest mapped eruptions in this system clock in at about 64 million years old. Younger flows in the same neighborhood land around 50 million years. That’s recent by Mars standards, and close to the parts of Earth history people actually remember from school.
The other part that makes it fun is that this wasn’t a one-and-done eruption. The researchers argue that the subsurface magma system kept evolving over time. As Bartosz Pieterek says in a release, “Our results show that even during Mars’ most recent volcanic period, magma systems beneath the surface remained active and complex.” He added, “The volcano did not erupt just once; it evolved over time as conditions in the subsurface changed.”
Were Mars Volcanoes Still Active When Dinosaurs Were Alive?
They pulled all of this off without grabbing a single rock. The team used orbital spectroscopy data from CRISM on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to read mineral signatures across different lava units. The older, fissure-fed flows show olivine signals, which point to hotter, deep-sourced magma. Later, cone-related flows skew toward high-calcium pyroxenes, which fits a story where magma sat around, cooled, and chemically changed before it made its next appearance.
The lava shapes back it up. Older flows spread farther and look smoother. Younger flows look shorter and thicker, consistent with a change toward more evolved, stickier magma. In the paper, the authors describe a long-lived plumbing system lasting at least 9 million years, with eruptive activity shifting from fissure-fed flows to more localized, cone-building eruptions.
Mars isn’t “alive” in any practical sense. But it also stayed geologically active later than many people would guess. Roughly 50 million years ago, it still had an interior hot enough to feed magma and sustain a long-lived plumbing system that evolved over time. That’s a different Mars than the frozen postcard version.
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