Study Provides Compelling Evidence of Single Impact Extinction Theory

ectotherm writes to tell us that a new study at the University of Missouri-Columbia claims to provide compelling evidence that a single meteor impact was the cause of animal extinction 65 million years ago. From the article: "MacLeod and his co-investigators studied sediment recovered from the Demerara Rise in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of South America, about 4,500 km (approximately 2,800 miles) from the impact site on the Yucatan Peninsula. Sites closer to and farther from the impact site have been studied, but few intermediary sites such as this have been explored."

Wombats

[by Anonymous Coward]

I suspect Wombats were somehow involved.

65 million?

[grub (11606)]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

Re:65 million?

[sRev (846312)]

I read this yesterday and have been looking in occasionally to read the comments at the bottom. It looks like there must be some global creationist group that is directing traffic to the story, as every comment makes just that same arguement. I guess the creationist party line is that the "flood" wiped out the dinosaurs. That's a lot of water.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

It looks like there must be some global creationist group that is directing traffic to the story, as every comment makes just that same arguement. I guess the creationist party line is that the "flood" wiped out the dinosaurs.

Maybe they are just hoping that a crapflood will wipe out scientists?

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.

Which also means that we could also postulate that the universe came into existence 10 seconds ago, complete with this comment half written.

Last Tuesday

[Kozar_The_Malignant (738483)]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.

This is often referred to as "Last Tuesdayism." The idea that the universe was created last Tuesday with the appearance of being 15 billion years old is logically impossible to falsify. Since it cannot be falsified, it is not science, but that doesn't stop the creationists from bringing up the idea. They never seem to understand that a corollary of it is that God is a liar.

There are also constant Usenet flamewars, religious jihads, and university campus riots between the Last Tuesdayists and the Last Mondayists. They're all heretics, of course. All right-thinking, intelligent people know that the universe was created by my cat Marvin three weeks ago Thursday.

Re:65 million?

[FST777 (913657)]

Old argument. Could He create a stone He couldn't lift?

I heard answers like: sure He could, after that He could improve His might so He could lift it (or eat the burrito).

Funny as hell.

Thruth is: if there is a God, He is definitely not omnipotent. Most people talk about a Almighty God, which, in strict sense, means "One with all might". That doesn't mean He "can do everything", it means He can do anything every other being can, and perhaps a lot more (like creating a universe with an embedded existance, which I personally believe to be bogus).

Back to the "creation" thing: I'm christian. I believe God created the Universe, the earth and all living and non-living beings. That doesn't mean he created the world in six literal days, nor does it mean that "it just happened" as he wished. He could have initiated everything and guided it since then.

Bottomline is: when you mix up science and religion, you degrade the value of both. The question of the scientific origin of "us" shouldn't be hampered with religious prejudice, nor should the question of religious origin be hampered with scientific prejudice. In the end, it's up to the individual to combine both beliefs into one.

What both ends always should realize: everything you say which you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt is a theory. At this point in time, macro-evolution seems the more likely theory. For others, Intelligent Design could seem the most likely. But these questions should always be regarded as a theory, not as facts, and should be considered from a scientific point of view, instead of a religious one. It's apparent that most creationists forget that rule, but to me it's also apparent that a bunch of evolutionists forget it: it almost is a sport to degrade monotheists with scientific theories.

Re:65 million?

[shutdown -p now (807394)]

There are other ways around that paradox. The one I tend to like most is that "a stone the God cannot lift" is not definable in a meaningful way. It simply doesn't mean anything, much the same as "result of division of 1 by 0" (the latter is not infitity BTW... it's nothing, as in, there's simply no such thing), or, even simpler, a "square circle".

Can God create a "square circle" or a "triangle with four sides"? The fallacy is that of assuming that the answer of canCreate(x) should be either true or false. For some values of x, you just get an ArgumentException, which is really neither ;)

P.S. And no, I'm not a Christian.

Re:65 million?

[flynt (248848)]

So you have no problem granting me equal logical standing when I say the following: that I have, as of this moment, created your entire reality. Isn't it possible that if I was the creator, and created the universe, then I could also have created that universe with a false history? You believe me don't you? I have a post that says it's true! All other posts were planted here by me to tempt the faithless.

The problem with the statement is that there is no way to challenge it. You can't prove it, I can't disprove it, at best it's uninteresting, and at worst it's meaningless.

Re:

[TheJorge (713680)]

I see a bigger problem with that statement.

If we are to assume God did in fact create the universe and all its laws in such a way to make it look as though it's been around a lot longer than it has, and then gave us the tools of analysis and reason to "discover" these laws and the universe's history, who are we to thumb our noses at him and see through his giant fabrication? I mean, if He went to all this effort to make it look like there were dinosaurs 65 million years ago, carefully placing each photon a

oblig Bill Hicks

[BitterAndDrunk (799378)]

'Sure.' Dinosaurs? ..... 'God put those there to test our faith.'
I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?
'Uh huh.'
Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads?
God's running around, burying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We'll see who believes in me now, ha HA. I'm a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho.'
You know, you die, you go to St. Peter, 'Did you you believe in dinosaurs?'
Well, you know, there was fossils everywhere. [Bill makes sound effects with his mic] KOOM Aaaahhhh. 'What are you, an idiot? God was FUCKING with you! Giant flying lizards, you moron! That's one of God's easiest jokes!'
'It seemed so plausibleeeee! Ahhhhhhhh!' Bound for the lake of fire. . . . "

We miss you Bill . . . please tell the flying saucers to drop you off for another show.

Metaphysics

[CustomDesigned (250089)]

A false history is a metaphysical concept. Any scientific investigation would see the "false" history. Indeed, the "false" history is the true physical history seen by honest scientists - except when viewed from outside the system. There is no sense even bringing it up in a scientific discussion.

An analogy would be a computer simulation. You have a gigantic computer simulating a universe. You don't want to run the simulation from the big bang, so you load a precomputed state which includes 14 billion years already simulated. Now, this is important to know for discussions of the reality in which the giant computer exists. But it is meaningless for any discussion or investigation of the simulation rules for the universe being simulated.

BTW, your simulation has a "cheat" function called "miracle" used for, ah, errr, "debugging". The AI units in your simulation can't reliably tell which events are miracles, and which are normal operation of the simulation. This is because they cannot know the full state of the simulation, and likely won't even know the full rule set - due to being part of the simulation themselves.

Re:

[Maxo-Texas (864189)]

And what kind of a sick liar of a god would do that?

Should you worship such a god?

Which is more plausible. that such a god exists... or that the evidence we can repeatably measure is correct.

Re:65 million?

[by Anonymous Coward]

When Young Earth Creationists say that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, they're talking in God-years.

Re:65 million?

[wall0159 (881759)]

>> equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life
The theory of evolution is not a theory regarding the origin of life.

>> The Monkeyists might like to know
I presume you're trying to imply that people are thought to be descended from monkeys. This is not what evolution states.

>> there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12
This is true. In fact, the ratio has not been constant. A quick look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating shows that scientists are aware of this. (who would have thunk it?)
So, is the ratio constant historically? No. Does that make carbon dating useless? No.

>> I do expect at least 5 posts arguing against what I say
That'd be because what you say is factually incorrect and misleading.

Re:

[geobeck (924637)]

Do I believe that natural selection should be taught in school? YES I DO!!! It is a proven fact.

No, it's not. It's a theory that happens to fit the facts better than any other. If the Flying Spaghetti Monster lands tomorrow and starts handing out samples of the Primordial Pasta, current theories will be modified or discarded.

Re:65 million?

[TheCabal (215908)]

Do I believe that natural selection should be taught in school? YES I DO!!! It is a proven fact

Bzzzt. Wrong. Evolution is a theory, just like Einstein's theories of relativity, Pythagoras' Theorem, and Maxwell's Theory of Electromagnetism. There are no "scientific facts", just theories. A Theory attempts to explain a natural phenomenon. A theory becomes more accepted through repeated experimentation and observation. But if an experiment yields a result other than what the theory predicts (and the experiment was done properly), then the theory must be discarded in favor of the new evidence.

A Theory can never really be proven because the next experiment may yield a result other than what the theory predicts. A lot of people, especially Creationists, get hung up on "theory" and "fact". Creationists will assert that Evolution is just a theory- it is, and thank you for reiterating that. They also insist that their belief is Fact, which is where science and religion begin to diverge.

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan (676092)]

"They are only biased in the same way that a jury might be made biased upon seeing an overwhelming amount of evidence. They have reached their conclusions based on the large amount of compelling evidence, what have you reached your upon?"

I base mine on a compelling amount of evidence. What is your evidence?

Re:65 million?

[Artifakt (700173)]

Natural Selection has EVERYTHING to do with the First Spark of Life".

1. Standard evolutionary theory says that a lower mutation rate, (down to some minimum that is greater than zero) actually increases selection speed. That sounds counter-intuitive, but it is straight from Dawkins and similar sources. One reason here is that mutations are occuring in organisms that are already pretty close to perfectly adapted to their environments or they'd be dead. The few mutations that are improvements are generally small improvements, that take generations of testing to prosper. A high enough mutation rate, and a new mutation overwrites the last one before the first had time to be tested. To see this a little more clearly, just imagine a mutation that makes an annual type plant a little better able to resist drought. If droughts only happen in that area about every 20 years, the mutation only helps a carrier survive every twenty generations or so. There are several other arguements for this point, which can be found in the Dawkin's The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker, or in a typical college textbook on the subject.
(Anyone who doubts this is standard theory is welcome to write somebody such as Dr. Dawkins and ask, or for God's sakes read a little. Usually when I get this far, someone insists this isn't the standard theory of evolution at all, and proposes some kind of Lysenkoism as the standard instead. I am very sick and tired of proposing this and having people who think evolution means the X-men try to prove I'm wrong.).

2. Modern organisms use DNA, with both advanced error correction and mutation reduction. One form of correction is sexual reproduction, by using a second copy of most genes. One form of reduction is putting the DNA in a central nucleus where it is less exposed to chemical mutagens.

3. Fully modern DNA in sexual organisms has been around for at least 700 Million years (see Dr. Simon Conway Morris's estimates for the age of the earliest Ediacaran fauna. If he's not THE greatest still living expert on this, he's at least number 2.).

4. Less modern DNA, but still with error protection in the form of nucleated cells, has been inside the oldest fossil eukarotes since, at the absolute very least, 2.1 Billion years ago (again Morris's timetable). That's also about half the age of the Earth (4.2 Billion years).

5. Really primative DNA with no correction or protection, has been found, again at the very least, as far back as the first stromatolites (2.9 billion years). Most paleontologists (admittedly not all), point to earlier fossils, as early as 3.5 billion years old, for the first DNA based organisms.

6. DNA is believed to have developed from RNA. RNA is still used by most life as a messenger chemical, but is only found as a heredity chemical in some very primative viruses. The error rates for RNA are well known, and indicate evolution must have been proceeding very slowly, even compared to the most primative DNA based life. The living record agrees with this, as do extensive tests comparing generalized eukarotes with all surviving types of non-eukarotes. While it's not as universally agreed by biologists as the earlier points, it's still generally agreed that RNA did predate DNA. You can find a few recognized biologists who don't support this last point, but they are a distinct minority, under 5%.

7. This means, we have counted back to within about 700 million years of the time Earth formed, just for the three stages of DNA based life. That's about 84% of all the time we have to explain life. The RNA dominant period, when evolution was much slower, has to fit into that last 16%. Whatever came before RNA has to fit into what's left after RNA gets its share, and so on.

8. By the standard theory's best guess, there are at least a dozen stages, each with more primative molecules involved, going back to the beginnings of life. The earliest ones might have been non-living clay-like substances, where natural selection operated only

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan (676092)]

"there is equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life on this planet. What evidence and for what other possibilities?" Yes there is an equal amount of evidence demonstrating other possibilities. There is also little scientific evidence that points to evolution as the source off all life on this planet. Many cultures have reords of the great flood and other biblical events. There is physical evidence of other biblical events such as the sulfer balls from the site where Sodom and Gommorrah was beleived to have existed. As far as other possibilities are concerned, these possibilities include a supreme being creating life on this planet or life from beyond this planet bringing life here. I can go on and on with various forms of evidence, but most here have made up their minds about what they want to believe. I also have better things to do than spend my arguing back and forth with people who are stuck on one ideology. Yes, I was once an atheist, howeveronce I was open minded enough to look at evindence and records from many different sources and have changed my mind. By the way, I do have a college education in the sciences and many other scientists also believe in a Supreme being. One such Scientists is the father of modern calculus. His name is Isaac Newton. Does this mean that I agree with what the fundamentalist Christians believe? No It doesn't. In fact, my beliefs are in many ways very different from what most people call Christian. In fact, there is a huge difference between what the original biblical texts say and what most Christians THINK they say. Knowlege of ancient customs and idioms is essential in understanding what the Scriptures say. I do not approach any subject with blind faith. I base my belifs on what I have studied in the past.

Re:65 million?

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

Read through the comments at the bottom. Seriously. These people really believe this stuff, and I've personally met people who, if you try to talk to them about almost anything scientific (like, oh say, 80,000-year-old human remains) will absolutely tell you "No, way! The Earth is only 6,000 years ago. It says so in the Bible!"

I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions, but I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science. They are separate disciplines and need to be separate. If you absolutely must believe that the choice is eaither A) God loves me and the Earth is only 6,000 years or B) there was a mass extinction event on the Earth 65 million years ago, so there can't be a God, then you are either seriously depraved or downright stupid.

Re:

[truckaxle (883149)]

This reminds me of an incident at the San Diego museum of Natural History. There was a display of Therizinosaurus [wikipedia.org]. A group of kids were admiring the display when one of them asked out loud how old the fossils were. A member of the museum staff was walking by and overheard the question and quickly answer "72 million and 14 years".

That answer satisfied most, but after a few seconds another asked how could they ever identify the age so precisely. The staff member responded "Well when I started work here the

Re:

[ettlz (639203)]

And yet, you are here on Slashdot.

I do believe that grub is an anti-religious troll (read his sig, then read his posting history).

And yet, you are here posting anonymously, thereby preventing us from examining your proclivities.

Re:

[geobeck (924637)]

...there are over 1,000,000,000 Catholics in the world alone.

You mean in addition to the Catholics on other worlds?

Yes, I know what you mean, but the placement of your modifier says something else.

Re:65 million?

[ettlz (639203)]

Ever wondered what god the dinosaurs fought wars and slaughtered each other in the name of?

Jehovasaurus.

Next!

Re:

[LionMage (318500)]

Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.

Maybe if you read TFA, you'd recognize that the reason there's such a hubbub on Slashdot regarding this article is that a large percentage of the comments on the article were left by ultra-conservative fundamenta

Okay...

[Stanistani (808333)]

Since this helps to support a widely-held theory of the mass extinction 65 million years ago, why is this really news?

Help me out here.

Didn't they just fill in another data point?

Re:

[inKubus (199753)]

Some scientists believe that there were multiple events that caused the massive global change that caused the mass extinction. This theory is that there was only one.

It's amazing to imagine the world populated by giant birds and lizards. But what did these creatures breathe? Perhaps the world was covered in plant life, which provided a lot of Oxygen. Then the impact hit, killing the plants, lowering the oxygen enough that the larger animals just sort of suffocated. The smaller animals had smaller lungs

big news... but wrong

[zappepcs (820751)]

Dinosaurs were not killed off in a mass extinction 65 million years ago... many of them survived and are currently employed by the *AA and associated groups.

Re:big news... but wrong

[CreatureComfort (741652)]

If you count vultures and snakes, the GP still applies.

*sigh*

[OverlordQ (264228)]

I was *not* a meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, it was global warming. Let's examine the facts here, with nearly everybody driving around Bedrock in their souped up SUVs, you can imagine all the CO2 those things put out, not to mention the contributing factor of mass extinctions due to consumption of racks of ribs at drive-ins.

Re:*sigh*

[anzha (138288)]

You're confused. That was the synapsids in the Permian with their unchecked Volcano Maker Pro users.

The KT Event was a case of the dinos getting waaaaaaaaaaaay too excited over their Orbital Dynamics for Dummies books.

A tad bit more seriously. Take that Gerta Keller [wikipedia.org]!

Re:

[Woldry (928749)]

But I'm already driving as much as I can!

I call BS

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Look at the film. You can see another meteor on the grassy knoll.

Fl00d

[picob (1025968)]

If you want to laugh read through the comments. Laugh or be concerned, that is.

MacLeod?

[rainer_d (115765)]

Hell, he's probably witnessed it himself.

How it really happened...

[by Anonymous Coward]

65 million years ago...

Dino 1: Wii is the best dino console.
Dino 2: No. The Wii graphics suck. Xbox 360 is awesome.
Dino 3: Wii and Xbox 360 both suck. Playstation 3 with Cell processor rules. Plus we have BluRay.
Dino 1: PS3 is too expensive and there aren't enough blue diodes. All dinosaurs can afford Wii though. It great!
Dino 2: Meh, PS3 is expensive and Wii doesn't do hidef. Xbox 360 sits right in the middle and saves the day. Go 360, go!

God: Ok, that does it. No more dinosaurs.

Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[MROD (101561)]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

Around the K-T boundery there is not only the Chixalub impact but a large one in Germany and a couple of others which have been discovered, all within the dating error. Add to this that there's also the Decan Traps flood basalts being errupted, ocean currents changing as the north atlantic starts to open and the amount of flooded continental shelf decreasing hugely and you have several possible smoking guns.

The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out (along with many sea reptiles and other oceanic creatures). In fact there is still a doubt as to when it actually happened and over how long a period. Ammonites, it seems, saw the meteorite coming.. about a million years before it hit.

Re:

[cdrguru (88047)]

Uhhh, no.

Crater impacts in millions of years:

Yucatan - 65,000,000

Nordlingen, Germany - 5,000,000

Barringer, Arizona - 0.05

Yeah, there are a bunch of others out there but the spread is a lot more than you seem to think.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[flyingsquid (813711)]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

This is really misleading- there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is one of the largest meteorite craters ever discovered; vastly larger than anything we've ever seen in human history or anything that's happened in the past 65 million years. The rock or comet responsible for it is thought to have been about 10km in diameter, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour; in terms of energy released by that blast, we're talking about something that would have made a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR look like a couple of kids playing with fireworks. It is estimated that a Chicxulub-scale impact occurs on the order of once every 100 million years, if that often.

The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, meanwhile is one of the five largest mass extinctions to occur in the past half-billion years. In other words, a 1-in-100 million year event. What are the odds of two such large scale, exceptionally rare events occurring simultaneously? Pretty much nil. True, there may be a few scientists out there who debate whether the K-T extinction was caused by the Chicxulub, and they try to poke holes in the Alvarez extinction hypothesis. But they haven't been able to present a compelling alternative to it.

Finally, ammonites go right up to the K-T boundary. In a paper in PNAS, Pope et al. show stratigraphic ranges of ammonites; the majority of ammonites extend to within a few tens of thousands of years of the K-T boundary and many go extinct right at the boundary.

Weird

[pagaboy (1029878)]

40 responses and not a single noodly appendage in sight. Is everyone OK?

Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I want to know whether the meteor appeared from Earth to come from the direction of the Pleiades constellation that the Mayans would later prioritize in their studies with the world's most sophisticated pre-industrial astromomy.

It's already an interesting coincidence that the people whose empire was built on the site of the most influential astronomical event in "recent" Earth history would have such sophisticated astronomy. I wonder what they discovered about the part of the sky from which the meteor seemed (to the dinosaurs) to appear. The Mayan name for the Pleiades is "Tz'ab" [google.com], "the rattlesnake's tail", which is pretty resonant with a meteorite that killed the lizards ruling the world.

I also wonder if our current complex space sciences can reconstruct the path of the meteor from its origin, by studying the trajectories of the remaining solar system objects, and projecting back 65My to a slightly larger population. A lot has happened, but astronomers' deductions have made much of very little for quite some time.

Re:

[InsaneProcessor (869563)]

God has a sense of humor. When he created everything, he figured that there would be some idiots (we call them scientists but not all fall into the idiots class) that wouldn't believe the truth so He created a past that they could track down and say "see, there is no creation, just evolution" just to keep them busy.

--
Liberalisim is an absurd ideology that displays the lack of knowledge of history.

Re:

[ray-auch (454705)]

Look, we know the mice paid for it to be built around 2 million years ago - it says so in The Book.

But, lets look at both theories anyway.

1. the mice, 2m years ago, pay for the planet to be built to look like it is billions of years old, with fake fossils etc. buried as part of the construction process

2. God makes the planet 6k years ago, with dinosaurs and everything, then floods it when Noah's got two of everything into the ark. Except Noah forgot about all the dinosaurs, because they were small and easy

Re:

[ettlz (639203)]

Oh, so it's not

1. design it;
2. model it;
3. build it;
4. test it;
5. pray it stays up?

Re:

[Captain Splendid (673276)]

I have heard it said that when God cast out Satan from heaven that his impact on the earth is the same meteoric impact that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs.

So, what you're saying is that the dinos are the first ever "friendly fire" casualties?

Should explain why such a christian nation as the US is so good at it, then.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[TheCabal (215908)]

I think I lost some IQ points reading this. I'm going to go off and install Win95 now.

Re:

[Chris Burke (6130)]

So, how is it possible that birds were once as big as 747's?

The 747s were smaller back then. Duh!

Re:

[Jonas the Bold (701271)]

I'm not going to write a complete rebuttal, but to start with, a 747 has a wingspan of ~55 meters. Not that a 12 meter wingspan isn't big, but it is not the size of a 747. Second, a Pterosaur is not a bird. It's a different evolutionary branch entirely. Just because birds can't achieve that sort of wingspan, doesn't mean no flying animal can. Imagine if birds had died out and there were no bats, you'd find a fossil of a seagull and say gravity must have been lower because you can't breed a flying insect th

Re:

[pedantic bore (740196)]

Go back and read it again. Afterward, God promised he'd never do it again. After nuking a few cities of the plain, and drowning almost everything else, he realized it was time to chill out and limit himself to a few massacres here and there.

p.s., yes, I'm probably going to hell for that.