I read somewhere that dinosaurs being taken out by an asteroid is a myth. What actually happened?
I see two possibilities here.
- Some random guy said so and you believed him because he has an agenda or he’s just fucking with you.
- You misunderstood what they actually said and just read the headline.
Either way you’re kinda right. Kinda. You know just in the “I didn’t tell you the whole entire truth” kinda way.
The asteroid is responsible for killing 75% of all life on the planet. That part is pretty much certain but it’s not directly responsible for killing them all. It was the trigger for it.
Everything within something like several hundred miles of the impact site would have been vaporized by the fireball. Further out the wind would have been so strong it would have stripped the flesh from their bones and blown them away as literal mountains of dirt and rocks and stone blasted them.
The power of the explosion sent tons of material into the air which eventually fell as flaming meteors raising the temperature of the surface so much that entire forests burned on the other side of the planet.
How do we know this? It’s because of an interesting geologic formation named the “KT boundary”.
This is a band of rock that covers the entire Earth. It’s several inches thick in some areas. What makes this interesting is two things.
The first is it’s rich in iridium. This is an element that is scarce on Earth but plentiful in space. Meaning the source must have come from space.
The second is the big dinosaurs, the really big ones like the T-rex? They’re all found under that layer. There is not one fossil of a T-rex that crosses it or appears on the other side of it. They’re all under it.
What does that tell us? The most likely scenario? A big space rock hit us some 65 million years ago and killed 75% of all life on the planet.
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