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New "Last Dinosaur" Find Backs Asteroid Extinction

Posted by samzenpus on from the sky-is-falling dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact, and did not go extinct gradually due to climate change or changes in sea level, as previous theories have proposed."

2 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Nonsense! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    They were killed by all of the cavemen for food.

    At least that's what my science teacher told me.

    - A Student from Kansas

  2. No, it doesn't by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Informative

    The margin of error on when the last dinosaurs were existent and the margin of error on when the K-T boundary was deposited are both hundreds of thousands of years.

    In some places there are at least 300,000 years of sediment between the fossil evidence of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event and the K-T boundary.

    K-T boundary has is dated to (65.5 ± 0.3) Ma, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event is dated to 65.5 Ma, so the impact could have been the day the last dinosaurs were alive, it could have been 300,000 years before, 11 years after, or 213,417 years after.