Chicxulub
  • MurrayL@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      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 🤷‍♂️

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      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.)