Fight over dinosaur deaths flares anew in San Francisco
The age of the dinosaurs ended abruptly about 65 million years ago when some catastrophic event drove them to extinction, and now a vehement controversy over their disappearance is emerging anew.
Like many scientific debates, this one is hot and has been going on for years, but only one side is having its say in San Francisco this week, and the dinosaurs have no one to speak for them.
An international group of scientists is arguing that poisonous fumes from violent waves of volcanic eruptions in India millions of years ago killed off the beasts, not - as UC Berkeley scientists first proposed nearly 30 years ago - the impact of a giant meteorite that blasted a huge undersea crater in Mexico and touched off a kind of “nuclear winter” that darkened the skies with a pall of dust and debris that the creatures could not possibly have survived. (continues)