Lava Flow May Have Caused Extinction

Pinhead writes "From MSNBC, it appears a new study suggests that a massive extinction that occurred 250 million years ago may not have been an asteroid but a large lava flow that spewed large amounts of poisonous gases in the air. This extinction led to the rise of the dinosaurs." Note that there are two different big extinctions: this first one occurred when plant life was mostly ferns, and all the continents were together in Pangaea. The later one is the one that everyone knows about, that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Comments

Fairy tales

[Anonymous Coward]

This story should start with "Once upon a time". Where is the hard evidence? Where is the experimental proof? Science is supposed to be a process of propose a hypothesis, design and conduct an experiment to test that hypothesis, and refine or reject the theory based on that experiment.

But stories like this are based on the assumptions that everything now is exactly as it always was (the Uniformitarian philosophy). No experiment can tell you what happened 4 thousand, 4 million, or 4 billion years ago. You have to accept on faith that conditions were just like today in order to believe these stories.

And believing based on faith is a religion, not science. Let's just deal with facts, not faith, when talking about science.