Meteor didn't do in the dinos

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Posted by Elie Dolgin
[Entry posted at 27th April 2009 05:24 AM GMT]
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55665/

The giant meteor that crashed off the coast of Mexico around 65 million years ago hit the Earth too early to explain the dinosaurs' demise and was too tame to even hurt a protist, according to a new study published today (Apr. 27) in the Journal of the Geological Society. Some researchers, however, maintain that the study's authors are needlessly wishing away the shooting star. .

The Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula has been hailed as the smoking gun that proves the theory that an asteroid impact exterminated around two-thirds of all living species, including dinosaurs, at the end of the Mesozoic era. But "we can show now for the first time that it did not cause mass extinction," Gerta Keller, a Princeton University paleontologist and geologist, told The Scientist. "It didn't kill the dinosaurs. In fact, it didn't cause much damage that we can determine from the geological record."