Maybe An Asteroid Didn't Kill The Dinosaurs

by Jeffrey Kluger - April 27th, 2009 - Time

When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar schools, you know it's long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That's the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago — as we've all come to know — an asteroid struck the Earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of the mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after the 65-million-year mark always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery of a 112-mi., 65-million-year-old crater off the Yucatán peninsula near the town of Chicxulub seemed to seal the deal.

Now, however, a new study in the Journal of the Geological Society throws all of that into question. The asteroid impact and the dinosaur extinction, argue the authors, may not have been simultaneous, but rather may have occurred 300,000 years apart. That's an eye-blink in geological time, but it's a relevant eye-blink all the same, one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to have sent the extinction theory entirely awry.

Science is amazing. Real Science. Not the politically correct science of the Democrats but the science of "what really happened." This article talks about scientists who have found a time gap between the asteroid impact and the mass extinction that led to the dominance of mammals. It suggests you cannot blame the asteroid.

What I find intriguing in life is the quest for knowledge that drives mankind to want to understand what really happened and then to predict what may happen next. That is the heart and soul of what sets us apart from the rest of the mammals. Not the knowing alone, but the desire to know more and to understand. From my perspective it is also the difference between most conservatives and most progressives.

Progressives think that they have all the answers and react with rage to anyone challenging their conventional wisdom. Witness the hysterical rage of Al Gore and the environmental extremists who demand that no one challenge their "opinion" about the proven idiocy of their "hockey stick" projection.

Conservatives are curious and want to understand our world as it is. Knowing what we don't know is just as important as knowing what we do know. It provides intelligent focus on the expenditure of efforts for the future. This article is a great addition to our quest for knowledge. Someday I bet we will know what happened. In the meantime this is a great clarification of the exactitude of our existing knowlege. The hypothesis of an asteroid causing mass extinction has not been disproved but it has certainly been removed from the list of facts positively proved.