It's definitive: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

It's definitive: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

au.news.yahoo.com

Dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago with the force of a billion atomic bombs, scientists said Thursday, hoping to lay an age-old debate to rest once and for all.

The definitive verdict came from an international panel of experts who reviewed 20 years' worth of evidence about what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction that wiped out more than half the species on the planet.

They determined it was a massive asteroid, measuring around 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide, which smashed into what is today Chicxulub in Mexico.

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"The asteroid is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima," the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science.

"It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days."

The panel of 41 scientists hope their findings will lay to rest once and for all the debate about what caused the KT extinction.

Well i never realised that this was still a theory. I guess it has become scientific fact now. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.



au.news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Originally posted by SilentShadow

"The asteroid is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima," the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science.

"It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days."

The panel of 41 scientists hope their findings will lay to rest once and for all the debate about what caused the KT extinction.

Well i never realised that this was still a theory. I guess it has become scientific fact now. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.



au.news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I never realized this was still a theory, either! Kudos on the posting!

p.s. your sig, in every thread I see it in, I'm always seconds from trying to swat those buggers in my peripheral vision away while reading

Haha, I find this pretty funny.

I guess it has become scientific fact now. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.

The whole notion of anything "65-million years ago" being "definitive" or "scientific fact" is just plain silly. I mean seriously--we don't even know for sure how old Earth is. You can tell me the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Wow! That's pretty impressive.

We can't ever know for sure because we weren't there to witness it firsthand.

That's just my $0.02 though.

Originally posted by slowfade
Haha, I find this pretty funny.

I guess it has become scientific fact now. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.

The whole notion of anything "65-million years ago" being "definitive" or "scientific fact" is just plain silly. I mean seriously--we don't even know for sure how old Earth is. You can tell me the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Wow! That's pretty impressive.

We can't ever know for sure because we weren't there to witness it firsthand.

That's just my $0.02 though.

Your expectation of "proof" is pretty high. If the only way to prove something is to have witnessed it, you will have a hard time proving anything. Witnessing something is probably the worst form of proof.

The human ability to witness something and then later recall what exactly they witnessed is very rarely accurate.

and to think that astronomers can only scan 30% of the sky at a time
Lots of room for error.

reply to post by iamcamouflage

Your expectation of "proof" is pretty high. If the only way to prove something is to have witnessed it, you will have a hard time proving anything. Witnessing something is probably the worst form of proof.

I'd agree with you partially. What I was really trying to say, though, was that we cannot really be sure about anything that has happened long before our lifetimes (or before recorded history), and calling this a "scientific fact" is kind of absurd, in my opinion.

My question is, since the earth is always getting larger from space debris and all that stuff. How much smaller would the earth have been 65 million years ago? Would that size of an explosion be as dramatic as it was back then. I do realize that an explosion of that size would be huge, but think on the size scale. If the earth was half it's current size obviously that would be a huge impact. where as now we would only suffer less damage if it hit. (theoretically)

reply to post by SilentShadow


Ok it's difinitive then. Poor bastards are better off. Otherwise they'd
be lookin at death and taxes.

[edit on 4-3-2010 by randyvs]

reply to post by SilentShadow


I never liked them using the word Wiped Out or Extinct when talking about the dinosaurs. Statements like that left me confused about evolution because how could evolution be true if they all died. Of course now I understand that only most species died out, not all and that some of those that survived evolved into birds but when I was still learning as a kid it left me very confused.


[edit on 4-3-2010 by Titen-Sxull]

Have you ever considered also that the dinosours became extinct by the process of selection? That is they were selected to die off from the face of the earth because their purpose was already completed. The creator put them to sleep because it was time for man to populate the earth. These two species can't mix for one species will be the dominant - i mean dino eat man.

As for the purpose of creating them, simple, there was so much vegetation on earth, to control their growth he created these great "monsters" capable of swallowing enormous amount of vegetation.

Think about this also, if a comet/asteriod was responsible of their demise, how did the samller animals survived this catastrophic event? Why, a rat is able to survive a kiloton explosion better than a dino. What gives? How about the very delicate butterfly? How did it survive the explosion and the following winter storm?

So imho - the dino's died because their purpose was done.

we should have known....

after all, 6 + 5 is 11.

reply to post by edmc^2


...they were killed off for the purpose of becoming the oil that we depend on every day.
And the good book has plenty to say about this too.

reply to post by edmc^2


The way it was explained to me, many of the early mammals had burrows underground and as a result were able to avoid the worst of the cataclysm. As for insects, they are one of the most abundant forms of life on the planet, so even if most of them were killed there are still going to be plenty left, and considering the rate at which they reproduce it would not take long for them to get their numbers back up.

So, because a panel of scientists agree that this is the most valid theory, then it is now fact?

Who picked these scientists?
What facts were they presented with and just how reliable are they?
Did any of these scientists have something to gain or to lose?
Those who put the panel together: did they have something to gain or to lose?

The theory does seem sound, but to make it fact means that all other theories will, from now on, be ignored. Meaning that it simplifies matters if it's true, but will lead to a lot of bad science if it's wrong...

reply to post by Alxandro


and that one too!

Scientific fact is that nothing is factual. See my signature.

That's a good article, some had proposed the volcanic activity as an alternate possibility but this paper says that wasn't the cause.

Originally posted by ajmusicmedia
So, because a panel of scientists agree that this is the most valid theory, then it is now fact?

Who picked these scientists?
What facts were they presented with and just how reliable are they?

The scientists pushing the volcanic or any other theory can still publish a paper with their findings right? They would need to find some new or stronger evidence to be convincing, but no paper is ever the "final" paper in science if a new discovery is made that contradicts the previous finding. Having said that, I think the meteor theory is much more solid than the volcanic theory ever was, though one could also say things weren't going all that great already due to volcanic actvity even before the meteor hit, so it was possibly a combination of factors, though the volcanic activity alone wasn't enough to cause the extinction.

Originally posted by anubis9311
My question is, since the earth is always getting larger from space debris and all that stuff. How much smaller would the earth have been 65 million years ago?

Earth would have been within 1% of its current size 65 million years ago. We get an average of 40 tons a day of space dust which sounds like a lot, but the Earth is so massive that it has a very small effect on a percentage basis.

Originally posted by edmc^2
Think about this also, if a comet/asteriod was responsible of their demise, how did the samller animals survived this catastrophic event? Why, a rat is able to survive a kiloton explosion better than a dino. What gives?

I have thought about that. Within a certain radius of the impact, nothing would have survived, not even mammals. Outside of that radius, there would be lots of dinos gradually dying of starvation. They might resort to cannibalism but they had big appetites and without a food chain to feed them, they would eventually all die of starvation. I think the mammals had the advantage of small size, they didn't need to eat much to survive and with all the dinosaur corpses around they could survive on the dino corpses until the food chain resumed.

And maybe not all the dinos went extinct, the smaller ones apparently survived and evolved into birds, further confirming it was a size issue.


[edit on 5-3-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Originally posted by edmc^2
As for the purpose of creating them, simple, there was so much vegetation on earth, to control their growth he created these great "monsters" capable of swallowing enormous amount of vegetation.

Why didn't He just simply get rid of some vegetation. Why go through the trouble of creating the dinosaurs when He could have just waved his hand and "cut the lawn", so to speak?

I have thought about that. Within a certain radius of the impact, nothing would have survived, not even mammals. Outside of that radius, there would be lots of dinos gradually dying of starvation. They might resort to cannibalism but they had big appetites and without a food chain to feed them, they would eventually all die of starvation. I think the mammals had the advantage of small size, they didn't need to eat much to survive and with all the dinosaur corpses around they could survive on the dino corpses until the food chain resumed.

And maybe not all the dinos went extinct, the smaller ones apparently survived and evolved into birds, further confirming it was a size issue.

So by your scenario - are you saying that the smaller the animal the better its chance of survival - thus they are the fittist? I thought the dinos were on top of the food chain - looks like they were not according to you. What about the insects? How did they survive the cataclismic event? The simple mosquito has more survival chance because of it's size/qty? What gives? Also were the dino's located on just one side of the earth when the asteriod struck the earth or were they scattered throughout the planet living amongst the insects and the rest of the animals? If so, then how did the dino's died? If the entire earth suffered a global ice age (another theory) after the asteriod struck the earth how did the rest of the animals / insects survive?
So from my perpective - selective elimination/extinction makes more sense, mathimatically, physically and logically.