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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Fun fact, most of what we know about the impact and the meteor comes from data found during Nuclear Weapons Testing. The energy needed for crystallization at impact sites gave us the data we needed to extrapolate for the force of impact at the crater, alongside other factors such as liquification of granite.
Also fun fact: ‘a meteor killed the dinosaurs’ is more or less universally accepted now, but younger folks might not realise it’s a pretty recent theory.
It was first proposed in 1980, they found the likely impact site in 1991, and it was officially endorsed by an expert panel in 2010.
I have books on my shelf from the 90s that say no one knows what killed the dinosaurs.
In elementary school in the 90s I remember an exercise where we had to imagine what killed the dinosaurs. I came up with an implausible scenario of overpredation, and because I grew up in the south a classmate of mine said the Biblical flood killed them all and was praised by the teacher 🤷♂️
I said it was because the mammals were better at hiding and all the dinosaurs ate each other
Maybe the teacher liked that kids over-active imagination?
I wonder when we'll find out that flood basalts (the Deccan Traps, in this case) are the "exit wounds" of the meteor impacts?
(That's my hypothesis, anyway, but I don't have the geology background to investigate it properly.)
In a way, the demise of the dinosaurs is kind of like the fall of Rome (the 5th century one), in that the conditions created by the impact wiped out many of the dinosaurs, but birds survived and are only not considered (by some) to be dinosaurs because of our categorisation, in the same way that the fall of Rome which was completed by Germanic invaders left the Eastern Roman Empire to survive long after that, and despite denial from some, has direct descendance from the Roman Empire.
It's been a wild recent change of categorization based not on features but on genetic evidence whenever possible.
TBF I could find a book from the last couple of years claiming the dinosaurs weren't real.