1. Bang and blame.
- Subjects
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DINOSAUR extinction , *DINOSAURS , *MARKETING , *FOSSILS , *BIOLOGICAL extinction , *CARBON , *IRIDIUM , *PLATINUM group , *METEORS , *METEORITES , *CRYPTOEXPLOSION structures , *PALEONTOLOGY - Abstract
MARKETING is everything. Dinosaurs were introduced to the public in the 1850s, when life-size models of them were used to decorate the most popular tourist attraction in the world--London's Crystal Palace. And the creatures' spectacular lives were rounded with a spectacular death when it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of most palaeontologists that they were wiped out by a collision between the Earth and an asteroid. A paper in this week's Science purports to identify an impact crater as big as the famous" dinosaur killer" at Chicxulub, in Mexico. The presence of iridium--a metal rare at the surface of the Earth, but relatively abundant in meteorites--was the first clue pointing towards the dinosaur-killing impact. A Verneshot would, according to Dr Phipps Morgan, produce almost all of the evidence thought to indicate an asteroid strike: iridium (which would be brought up from deep in the Earth), shocked quartz, buckyballs, spherules--and big impact craters caused by the return to Earth of huge gobbets of material the explosion ejected. The idea that mass extinctions are caused by impacts from outer space has been one of the best marketed pieces of popular science--it has even inspired Hollywood movies. It would be ironic, indeed, if Dr Becker's Australian crater, on the face of things such eloquent evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of mass extinctions, turned out to be a crucial nail in that theory's coffin.
- Published
- 2004