The day the Dinosaurs died

[UM-Bot]

The following is a chapter from the new book by Robert Walker O'Neal Ph.D which provides a fictional account of the asteroid impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago which caused the death of the dinosaurs. Destination: Earth: The cosmic hammer was a space rock. The Earth was its timber. The hammer was fashioned in a violent inferno, when two planets collided billions of years before the rock would visit Earth. An asteroid-size stone was but a parcel amid the rubble. For eons, this rock tumbled at an unimaginable velocity toward a small blue planet parked along the galaxy's suburbs. This alien boulder was the size of Mount Everest. Given water and artificial atmosphere, it could have sustained several space colonies for humans and animals. But no space colonies would ever inhabit that real estate. During Earth's Cretaceous era, humans were yet to be born. Dinosaurs reigned over lesser animals and pterosaurs ruled the skies. Beneath the immense Western Interior Seaway, the great Megalodon shark was large enough to eat whales for breakfast. Although billions of years had passed since those alien worlds collided, these animals' fates were sealed from the moment of the planetary impact. All would be the victims of Earth's Fifth Mass Extinction.

This wasn't the first asteroid to hit our planet, and it won't be the last. 183 million years before, an asteroid ended the Permian-Triassic Age. And just one million years before, near what is now Mason, Iowa, a two-mile wide asteroid smashed into Earth's crust at 43,000 miles per hour, creating a twenty-mile wide and six-mile-deep crater. Its effect was that of ten times all the world's atomic bombs exploding together. But the rock now speeding toward Earth was three times the size of the Iowa asteroid. Three of the previous four extinction events had been by reason of earthborn calamities. The worst had been the Permian-Triassic extinction long before. 95 percent of all plants and animals vanished forever beneath the wrath of a ten-mile-wide asteroid.. Climate change was the identified killer for three mass extinctions. Only the asteroid from the Permian event had produced a tragedy comparable to the terror appointed to the inhabitants of the late Cretaceous. In previous epochs, plants had been of the non-flowering variety, like ferns and conifers. No one knows how or why flowers had developed just a few million years before. But here they flourished everywhere in this wild and wonderful age. Researchers most familiar with Charles Darwin's work admit that his most celebrated conclusion was more a leap of vast imagination than that of hard science. After all, no transitional fossil, indicating the change of one species to another, has yet been found. And those researchers find one failing of his imagination to be rather odd. Although Darwin could somehow envision that a single-celled creature might ultimately evolve to its standing as homo sapien, he couldn't figure out how primitive plants evolved into flowering plants. He called it an “abominable mystery.”

During its light-years' journey, the asteroid encountered an occasional floater, a rocky obstruction. Given the object's velocity, many of these road bumps understandably chipped away a random chunk or two. But in the relatively sterile vacuum of space, its gargantuan body had remained essentially intact from the day of its parent's destruction. So safe until that instant, the asteroid smacked into Earth's atmospheric shelf like a bus hitting a brick wall. Shards of pebbles and larger stones exploded at its outer perimeters and those fragments spider-webbed toward the planet below. Deeper into increasingly thickened atmosphere, the friction chafed its coat like sandpaper on wood. The main structure flamed blue-white and soon was chased by a forty-kilometer-long inferno of a tail that could now be spotted by inhabitants at the planet's surface. Had the rock not attained a targeted and directed velocity since the day its parent planet impacted another, it would have fallen straight down like any floater snared in Earth's gravity. Instead, its swift and angular trajectory hurled it from Earth's near edge toward its far side, facing the sun. At the asteroid's ultimate point of arrival, Earth's rotation had positioned that piece of real estate so that it was now early morning. The sun's rays would soon break at the far horizon.

[Ghost Ship]

A tungusta type blast wiped them out maybe. Just like it almost did in the Tungusta blast.

[Celumnaz]

Read they got some Mammoth sperm they're gonna try and make a mammoth.

Thinking about an asteriod impact, and it's not a matter of if but when... and then looking at my hairspray and car exhaust... it just doesn't seem like such a big deal...

[GreyWeather]

^ whhhhhaaaaattt?

The start of this novel kinda ruined it... it strayed to far from the stories main road (from a meteor to humans living on an asteroid, to humans not being born yet and then back to dinosaurs )

[Celumnaz]

^ whhhhhaaaaattt?

Which part? The mammoth sperm, my trite dig at global warming... or was that directed at the OP?

[GreyWeather]

Which part? The mammoth sperm, my trite dig at global warming... or was that directed at the OP?

all of it, t'was randomness'ness

[Mike8272]

Well suppose we could do with some mammoths.

As for the book might try and gain a copy and hav a read.

[UtahRaptor]

Hmmmmm...... I wonder what Mammoth meat would taste like.......

I thought the same thing when the soft and meaty tyranosaurian marrow was found.....

Edited September 15, 2006 by UtahRaptor