Dinosaurs Died Within Hours of Asteroid Impact, says New Study

colonist writes "SPACE.com reports that most dinosaurs were incinerated within hours by the 'heat pulse' of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. The study 'Survival in the first hours of the Cenozoic' presents a scenario where the only survivors were underground or were underwater in swamps or oceans. All unprotected creatures were 'baked by the equivalent of a global oven set on broil.'"

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Obligatory Jurassic Park Quote

[Lorenzo de Medici]

Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum):Don't you see the danger, John, in what you're doing here? Genetic force is the most awesome power the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that found his dad's gun. I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here. It didn't acquire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it. You patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now your selling it! You wanna sell it! Well, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop if they should. No, hold on John, this is not an animal wiped out by deforestation or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot and nature selected them for extinction.

Pretty scary if nature selected them in a matter of seconds. Too bad the vastly hyper-intelligent dinosaur civilization's NASA counterpart didn't have a Near-Earth Object Program.