You probably have heard about the asteroid. Big BOOM. You can’t really look at a generic picture of dinosaurs on the Interwebs without seeing them fleeing from hellfire and brimstone. But the asteroid involves two parts. The latter part is what happened after the BOOM, and I’ll tell that story toward the end of the alphabet. You’ll have to guess what letter.
But the first part of the scientific part of the story is how did they know? How could scientists tell that there was a big giant asteroid that eliminated all the dinosaurs? Maybe they could figure out from the fossil record that the dinosaurs disappeared. But how did they know it was caused by an extraterrestrial event? Particularly when the impact crater was, as it turns out, deep under water?
They didn’t know at first. The scientific method triumphed in the end. And fathers and sons.
The Old Ideas of Catastrophe
Before 1980, paleontologists did know that dinosaurs disappeared, around 64 million years ago, in fact. The end of the Cretaceous period was set at 64–and not 100 or 150–precisely because that was when all the dinosaur fossils disappeared. It was somewhat handy that it happened during a chalky geological period since that made it easy to spot on the sides of cliffs.
