New Extinction Theories, The Meteor Impact
For more details on this topic, see Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.Traditionally paleontology had followed geology in preferring uniformitarian mechanisms, despite the promotion by Eugene Merle Shoemaker of the importance of catastrophic impacts.
During the renaissance period Walter Alvarez and others found iridium in the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary layer. Also the Chicxulub Crater, was identified and determined to be due to a meteor impact. These discoveries led to the acceptance and popularisation of the idea that the extinction had been caused by a meteor impact.
This in turn undermined the assumption that dinosaurs had become extinct because they were inferior to mammals. Instead it suggested they had fallen prey to a random event which no large animal could have survived.
Read more about this topic: Dinosaur Renaissance
Famous quotes containing the words extinction, meteor and/or impact:
“Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid-air stands still.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)