Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space

ianare writes "Eight tusks and a bison skull all show signs of having being blasted with iron-nickel fragments, typical meteorite material. Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction. But the team was astonished to find the animal remains were about 35,000 years old, rather than from the known impact of 13,000 years ago."

Comments

Re:What About the Clovis?

[explosivejared]

"For us the difficulty is that we see patterns but we don't understand what the underlying process is; so it becomes difficult to ascribe causation," he explained.

Therein lies the problem of ever ascribing certainty to any one event causing mass extinctions or any other climatological or biological shift. Earth is built with so many complex systems that it will almost always be a large combination of factors that result in change.

1,000,000,000 to 1

[mastershake_phd]

Small meteors hit the earth all the time, its a long shot but maybe this animal was just in the wrong place place at the wrong time.

Re:Cool

[pnewhook]

Also, fossilized remains probably wouldn't have the maleability of bone to give you impact shockwaves without causing either shattering or other obvious signs of the impact occuring after fossilization.

They're only 35000 years old - they are not fossils! They are simply old remains and are still bones, not rock.