It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

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Bodily fluids topic

Blood is thicker than water.

Reptiles are not as adaptable to climate change as mammals, and humans have their own vulnerabilities. I believe Homo Sapiens Sapiens also has a limited shelf life, and we carry the roots of our own destruction. Of course, when that will be is speculation. Maybe another asteroid or some other as yet unimaginable destructive force.

The jury is still out on the raccoon.

One of my professors in college was actually the guy who came up with the whole "meteor/comet killed the dinosaurs" theory. Or him and his thesis advisor anyway (Luis Alvarez). He talked about it in class a few times:

He said his advisor (Alvarez) was reading some journal article saying that mass extinctions seemed to be periodic, and that Alvarez thought that was totally stupid. He thought they probably just did their math wrong. Muller said it didn't seem completely impossible, but Alvarez dismissed that and told him he was using a "no think approach." So Muller got mad and thought for a minute, and off the top of his head speculated that there could be a star in a 26-million year orbit, and which would actually put it at just the right range to graze the Oort cloud. So he (Muller) says maybe every 26-million years it knocks some "rocks/ice" loose and they stream towards the Earth and hit it. Alvarez was apparently a little stunned, and said "that's pretty good. We ought to try to see if we can prove that." So they started working on it.

One of the things they did was to look at sedimentary layers. Apparently you can easily see where the mass death happens. They looked right below that for a layer of dust -- specifically dust of extra-terrestrial (non-Earth) origin. And this is apparently possible, by looking at the mix of isotopes of certain elements (I forget which ones). And they found it. They looked in a number of spots around the globe and it was consistently there. Why didn't cinch the hypothesis (this was more than 20 years ago), I don't know.

They also started looking for that 26-million year orbit star, but last I heard (90's) they hadn't found it.

He (Muller) wrote a book about it called "Nemesis," his proposed name for the star.

As to how much iron a metor impact might add to all the iron on the Earth, I have no idea, but the blood comment isn't completely implausible.

So does my chin chilla, and he makes/uses tools.

The fossil records show it wiped 98% of all species off the earth in one go

Another asteroid the same size would only be visible from earth about a month before impact

Hope i get a front row seat

That is a bit on the high side. The species that lived in the oceans did not fare that badly.

In any case the smaller proto-mammals survived which is why we are having this conversation.

It think it was the Siberian and Deccan traps that did a 98 percent job on life on the planet.

ruveyn

you might be right there - this particular little splat just didnt hit quite so hard - but others have - and probably several times over in the pre fossil eternities too - so imagining that wont happen again is entirely unrealistic isnt it?

I KNEW IT IN PRESCHOOL I HAD A BET WITH SOME KID THAT THOUGHT VOLCANOES WIPED THEM OUT I SAID A ASTEROID I KNEW IT!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !

I'm not so sure that's true. The bacteria have been here a lot longer than we have (and they'll probably still be here when we're long gone).

Intelligence may be a great evolutionary adaption, but it's not the only one that works.