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Meteor Seen as Causing Extinctions on Earth

Posted by michael on from the proximity-defense-system-needed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From the NY Times (I think you may have to register): About three dozen minuscule shards of rock unearthed in Antarctica may be the fragments of a meteor that killed most life on Earth 250 million years ago, scientists are reporting today. These rocks have yielded soccer-ball-shaped molecules known as buckyballs containing extraterrestrial gases, as well as grains of quartz with fractures that indicate a tremendous shock. The extinction 250 million years ago, in a period known as the Permian-Triassic boundary, was the largest of all. About 90 percent of species disappeared."

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Pre-emptive correction by the+morgawr · · Score: 3, Informative

    No this was not the extinction that killed the dinosaurs. This occured earlier in time.

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    The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
    1. Re:Pre-emptive correction by the+morgawr · · Score: 3, Informative
      Paraphrased from palaeos (a little further down on that google query):

      Time scale works like this (from larger to smaller): Eon -> Era -> Period -> Epoch -> Age

      The Permian was the last period of the Paleozoic Era(which ending with the mass extinction). This was followed by the Mesozoic Era (whose first period was the Triassic). While Dinosaurs first appeared in the Triassic they become dominant during the Jurassic. Dinosaurs first appeared in the Carnian age (227 to 221 million years ago, durring the late Triassic) but were "small and insignificant: bipedal bird-like carnivores, insectivores, and herbivores. "

      --
      The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
    2. Re:Pre-emptive correction by kalidasa · · Score: 3, Informative

      The dino extinction is called the K-T extinction, for Cretaceous/Tertiary (it makes sense in German, I imagine), and the one in question would be the P-T extinction, for Permian/Triassic. So this is the previous huge mass extinction event to the K-T extinction. The Dinosauria branch off from the Reptilia in early Triassic, and all Dinosauria except the Aves die off at the K-T event.

      The P-T was bigger than the K-T.

  2. Another article by DjReagan · · Score: 3, Informative

    The BBC had an article on this also.

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    "When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
  3. Re:Naturally-occurring Buckyballs? by einstein · · Score: 3, Informative

    my understanding is, once we learned how to make them, we learned how to look for them, and they show up all over the place. lots of ash from wood fires have buckyballs in them, for instance.

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