Being Green - 03 November 2017
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WE KNOW WHAT DID THE DINOSAURS IN
It’s been known for a long time – going back to the early fossil discoveries – that the pre-historic lizard-like creatures called ‘dinosaurs’ are no longer around. They ‘died out’ – but although there was a wealth of speculation, it was only recently (the last forty years or so) that the finger was pointed at a great catastrophe that ushered in a new geological age and explained why everything changed so dramatically at the end of the Cretaceous Era. William Buckland was the first professor of geology at Oxford, and he had to finance the science partly himself – his real job was as a churchman, a reverend, but his enthusiasm for fossil discoveries was unbounded and he described scientifically the first dinosaur fossil (although he called it ‘Megalosaurus’, Giant Lizard.) That was in the ’18-twenties.
It was only when reliable dating could be done over a hundred years later that it was realized the extinction of the Dinosaurs (and many plants and other animals) went back 65-million years. And it was sudden – over 70 percent of the world’s species disappeared in the great End Cretaceous extinction event, and the mammals eventually filled the evolutionary gaps left by the dinosaurs. And those mammals are our ancestors, or at least one of them is.
Jump to the modern age, and I’m leaving out a ton of stuff here, but it was deduced through brilliant research that a huge meteor or asteroid impact catastrophically changed the atmosphere and led to plunging temperatures and the obscuring of sunlight, the global winter. The search was on for an impact crater 65 million years old, which would have been nearly wiped out by erosion – but after a long and intriguing set of developments it’s now generally agreed that the impact site is the one on – and under, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, the Chicxulub Crater.
Scientists, led by Professor Joanna Morgan of Imperial College in London, have been doing advanced detective work using th
It’s been known for a long time – going back to the early fossil discoveries – that the pre-historic lizard-like creatures called ‘dinosaurs’ are no longer around. They ‘died out’ – but although there was a wealth of speculation, it was only recently (the last forty years or so) that the finger was pointed at a great catastrophe that ushered in a new geological age and explained why everything changed so dramatically at the end of the Cretaceous Era. William Buckland was the first professor of geology at Oxford, and he had to finance the science partly himself – his real job was as a churchman, a reverend, but his enthusiasm for fossil discoveries was unbounded and he described scientifically the first dinosaur fossil (although he called it ‘Megalosaurus’, Giant Lizard.) That was in the ’18-twenties.
It was only when reliable dating could be done over a hundred years later that it was realized the extinction of the Dinosaurs (and many plants and other animals) went back 65-million years. And it was sudden – over 70 percent of the world’s species disappeared in the great End Cretaceous extinction event, and the mammals eventually filled the evolutionary gaps left by the dinosaurs. And those mammals are our ancestors, or at least one of them is.
Jump to the modern age, and I’m leaving out a ton of stuff here, but it was deduced through brilliant research that a huge meteor or asteroid impact catastrophically changed the atmosphere and led to plunging temperatures and the obscuring of sunlight, the global winter. The search was on for an impact crater 65 million years old, which would have been nearly wiped out by erosion – but after a long and intriguing set of developments it’s now generally agreed that the impact site is the one on – and under, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, the Chicxulub Crater.
Scientists, led by Professor Joanna Morgan of Imperial College in London, have been doing advanced detective work using th
