Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn’t really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan “Nitro” Siegel weighed in with a long and image-laden post laying out the evidence in favor of the impact-extinction link, and comparing Keller to climate change deniers and creationists.
Who’s right? Siegel makes a pretty good case that the preponderance of evidence favors the impact theory. I’m inclined to favor that as well, for sentimental reasons, but I really don’t have the background to judge. Mostly, I just wanted to note the post in question and say that if you’re not already reading Starts With a Bang, you should check it out.