Extinction Fell from the Sky?

An asteroidal collision is what ultimately doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, reports BBC News on the conclusions of a US–Czech research team. The team, composed of Bill Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky, and David Nesvorny, were searching for the cause of an alleged surge in asteroid impacts on earth in the last 100–200 million years. Their solution? That an asteroid pile-up blasted debris around the Solar System, with shrapnel hitting the moon, Venus, and Mars, as well as home sweet home. The computer-model-generated conclusion was reported in Nature.

In particular, the trio suggests a 170-kilometer-wide (106-mile-wide) asteroid was “disrupted” about 160 million years ago, resulting in the Baptistina family of asteroids. How does this relate to the dinosaurs?

The analysis shows, the team says, that one large [...] fragment dug out the 180km-wide (112-mile-wide) Chicxulub crater off what is today the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

This is the impact scar many scientists link to the Cretaceous/Tertiary Mass Extinction, which saw the dinosaurs disappear into the fossil record.

The idea is ... completely based on uniformitarian understanding of the geological layers.

The idea is interesting, certainly, but it is also completely based on uniformitarian understanding of the geological layers. Take that away by interpreting geological formations through the lens of a (Noachian) watery, rather than asteroidal, catastrophe, and the asteroidal extinction event is no longer necessary.