As steroid Im mpact Th hat Killed d the Din nosaurs: New Evi idence

The e idea that a cosmic imp pact ended th he age of din nosaurs in wh hat is now M Mexico now has fresh ne ew support, rese earchers say y. The e most recen nt and most familiar mass extinction n is the one that finished d the reign o of the dinosa aurs the end d-Cretaceous s or Cretaceo ous-Tertiary y extinction event, e often known as K K-T. The onl ly survivors among the din nosaurs are th he birds. Cur rrently, the main suspec ct behind thi is catastroph he is a cosm mic impact fr from an asteroid or com met, an idea firs st proposed by physicist t Luis Alvar rez and his son geologi ist Walter A Alvarez. Scie entists later found that sign ns of this collision seem med evident t near the to own of Chic cxulub (CHE EEK-sheh-lo oob) in Mex xico in the form m of a garga antuan crate er more than 110 miles (180 ( kilomet ters) wide. T The explosio on, likely ca aused by an object about 6 miles (10 km m) across, would w have released r as m much energy y as 100 trillion tons of T TNT, more an a billion ti imes more th han the atom m bombs that t destroyed H Hiroshima an nd Nagasaki i. tha However, furth her work su uggested the Chicxulub impact occu urred either 300,000 ye ears before o or 180,000 ars after the e end-Cretac ceous mass extinction. As such, r researchers h have explor red other po ossibilities, yea including other impact sit tes, such as s the controversial Shiv va crater in India, or e even massiv ve volcanic uptions, such h as those cre eating the De eccan Flats in i India. eru Tim ming of an impact i New w findings using high-precision ra adiometric dating d analy ysis of debr ris kicked u up by the im mpact now sug ggest the K-T T event and the Chicxulu ub collision happened n o more than n 33,000 year rs apart. In r radiometric dat ting, scientis sts estimate the ages of samples based b on the e relative p proportions o of specific r radioactive ma aterials within them. [Wipe Out: Hist tory's Most Mysterious M M Mass Extinc ctions] "W We've shown the impact and a the mas ss extinction coincided a as much as o one can poss sibly demon nstrate with existing dating g techniques," research her Paul Re enne, a geo ochronologist and dire ector of the e Berkeley ochronology y Center in California, C to old LiveScie ence. Geo

"It's gratifying to see these results, for those of us who've been arguing a long time that there was an impact at the time of this mass extinction," geologist Walter Alvarez at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this study, told LiveScience. "This research is just a tour de force, a demonstration of really skillful geochronology to resolve time that well." The fact the impact and mass extinction may have been virtually simultaneous in time supports the idea that the cosmic impact dealt the age of dinosaurs its deathblow. "The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point," Renne said. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow, and therefore, the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn't just the impact." The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years. "When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years," added paleontologist William Clemens at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this research. "It's an exciting time right now, a lot of which we can attribute to the work that Paul and his colleagues are doing in refining the precision of the time scale with which we work." Final blow Although the cosmic impact and mass extinction coincided in time, Renne cautioned this does not mean the impact was the only cause of the die-offs. For instance, dramatic climate swings in the preceding million years, including long cold snaps in the general hothouse environment of the Cretaceous, probably brought many creatures to the brink of extinction. The volcanic eruptions behind the Deccan Traps might be one cause of these climate variations. "These precursory phenomena made the global ecosystem much more sensitive to even relatively small triggers, so that what otherwise might have been a fairly minor effect shifted the ecosystem into a new state," Renne said. The cosmic impact then proved the deathblow. "What we really need to do is to understand better what was going on before the impact what was the level of ecological stress that existed that allowed the impact to be the straw that broke the camel's back?" Renne said. "We also need better dates for the massive volcanism at the Deccan Flats to better understand when it first started and how fast it occurred." The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science. Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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