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Re:I think I have something on extinction



Josh Williams (williad5@firn.edu) wrote:
>Yes, but if it was "just right" then it might have a few dents in them.
>Well not really. WHen the bones were fossilized then the "dents" would
>have been either smoothed out or rendered unrecognizabe in some other way.
>I was on to something there for a little bit, though.

 Short of finding dinosaur bones with fragments of meteorites embedded in 
them, there is no way to show that any particular dinosaur died as a result
of an impact.  However, there has been at least one passing reference in the
serious research journals that has come close to making a similar claim as the 
claim you made (so don't be too hard on yourself!).  Except, it wasn't
a dinosaur getting damaged by a killer meteorite, it was a poor
cephalopod (a mollusk) that purportedly got bonked by a rock from space.
I don't happen to believe that the ceph. got bonked by the meteorite (it
seems more likely that the cephalopod was already dead on the sea bottom, and
the meteorite settled on top of it).
  At any rate, read all about it in:

     Thorslund, P., and Wickman, F. E. 1981. Middle Ordovician chondrite
        in fossiliferous limestone from Brunflo, central Sweden.
        _Nature_ vol. 289 (January 22), pp. 285-286.