The Wimpy Asteroid

We couldn’t kick off the topic any better than Time magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger did this week:

When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar school, you know it has long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That's the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago—as we’ve all come to know—an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after that time always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery of a 112-mile, 65-million-year-old crater off the Yucatán Peninsula near the town of Chicxulub seemed to seal the deal.

The asteroid impact has long been blamed for the K–T extinction.

The asteroid impact has long been blamed for the K–T extinction, a period when (old-earth advocates believe) 70 percent of life died and numerous creatures (including dinosaurs) went completely extinct.

But a team led by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Jim Fassett has just upset the evolutionary status quo. The team analyzed dinosaur bones found in the San Juan Basin in the U.S. Using old-earth dating techniques—such as magnetic polarity—Fassett believes the evidence “independently indicate[s] that [the bones] do indeed post-date the extinction.” The bones have different concentrations of rare earth metal elements than corresponding “older” bones said to be from the time of the asteroid impact.

Taken together, the study indicates that based on old-earth interpretive methods, some dinosaurs definitely outlived the supposed extinction event. Not only does this mean the long-standing, popularly presented explanation of dinosaur extinction wasn’t quite right; it also means that evolutionists have been wrong every time they asserted that the asteroidal explanation was fact. Furthermore, any attempts by evolutionists to sidestep this study and uphold the K–T extinction event will show how they too interpret the facts to fit them in their worldview.

The LiveScience article also reports that “[m]any scientists now suspect other factors were involved [in the extinction], from increased volcanic activity to a changing climate.” That actually fits in well with the young-earth model, which envisions substantial geological activity of all sorts during the Flood year (including volcanoes, which could have given rise to the same chemical evidence interpreted as asteroidal impact), as well as changing post-Flood environment that eventually doomed the dinosaurs (as far as we know).