The world may someday end with a whimper, but evidence is mounting that the dinosaurs went out with a bang. According to the much debated theory proposed by the father-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, an asteroid or comet slammed into the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, spewing so much dust into the atmosphere that sunlight was blocked for months. Temperatures plummeted, plants withered, and many species, including the mighty dinosaurs, perished en masse.
Now chemists at the University of Chicago have added an important new twist to this version of the...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
