The T Rex Story

The T Rex was a large part of life post Jurassic Park. No, not as much me.... but because it completely caught the fancy of Dhruva, who was then three years old...and it became his singular obsession for years to come

The Meteroid Crater at the Yucatan plane of the Gulf of Mexico

I recall this incident a month or so after watching the movie; we're sitting down for breakfast and the coffee cup shook. Dhruva went cold and frigid....he's focusing on the window and asking....do you think a T Rex could be four storeys high? ( we lived on the fourth floor). He thought it was a Rex's walk that shook the cup......

That started a crazy level of fascination.  He could identify and name atleast a hundred different dinosaurs, with their physical characteristics, habitats, food habits et al. The whole family got together to bring him dinosaur books and toys from everywhere...I still have a bag full of them. Even our favorite two hundred piece jigsaw puzzle was a dinosaur scene... a fondly remembered Sunday activity that we did for months on end. (hoping I still have that one too). 

Well that's context for why I read and write about this piece of evolution, a review of 'Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe', by Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle physicist and cosmologist, by Maria Popova.

"She talks of the intellectually thrilling exploration of how the universe evolved, what made our very existence possible, and how dark matter illuminates our planet’s relationship to its cosmic environment across past, present, and future.

Randall weaves together a number of different disciplines — cosmology, particle physics, evolutionary biology, environmental science, geology, and even social science — to tell a larger story of the universe, our galaxy, and the Solar System. In one of several perceptive social analogies, she likens dark matter — which comprises 85% of matter in the universe, interacts with gravity, but, unlike the ordinary matter we can see and touch, doesn’t interact with light — so is part of the invisible but instrumental factions of human society:

She tells an expansive and exhilarating story of how the universe as we know it came to exist, and invites us to transcend the limits of our temporal imagination. How humbling to consider that a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos millions of years ago hurled at our unremarkable piece of rock, a meteoroid three times the width of Manhattan, which produced the most massive and destructive earthquake of all time, decimating three quarters of all living creatures on Earth.

Had the dinosaurs not died, large mammals may never have come to dominate the planet and humanity wouldn’t be here to contemplate the complexities of the cosmos. 

One of the most scintillating parts of the book illustrates this aspect of science in action. Beginning in 1973, a geochemist proposed that a meteoroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, only to be dismissed by the scientific community.

The notion remained radical until a geologist named Walter Alvarez embarked upon an investigative adventure that ended as one of the greatest breakthroughs in planetary science. 

They detected an unusually high concentration of iridium — a rare metal put to such mundane uses as fountain pen nibs — in the clay deposit separating two differently colored limestone layers. Because Earth is intrinsically low in iridium, they suspected that an extraterrestrial impactor was responsible for this perplexing quantity. After a team of nuclear chemists confirmed the anomaly, Walter and Luis Alvarez proposed that a giant meteoroid had hit the Earth and unleashed a downpour of rare metals, including iridium.

But rather than the end of the story, this was merely the beginning, sparking a worldwide scientific scavenger hunt for the actual site of the impact. Since craters are typically twenty times the size of the impactor and Alvarez estimated that the meteoroid was about ten kilometers in diameter, scientists set out to find a crater nearly 125 miles wide.

Despite the enormity of the target, the odds of finding it were slim — if the meteoroid had hit the ocean, which covers three quarters of Earth’s surface, the crater would be both unreachable and smoothed over by sixty-six million years of tides; had it hit the land, erosion, sedimentation, and tectonic shifts may have still covered its traces completely.

And yet, in a remarkable example of what Randall calls the “human ingenuity and stubbornness” driving the scientific endeavor, scientists did uncover it, aided by an eclectic global cast of oil industry workers, international geologists, three crucial beads of glass, and one inquisitive reporter who connected all the dots.

In 1991, NASA announced the discovery of the crater in the Yucatan plane of the Gulf of Mexico. But it wasn’t until March of 2010 — exactly thirty years after Walter Alvarez had first put forth his theory — that a collective of forty one elite international scientists reviewed all the evidence that the

meteoroid killed the dinosaurs and deemed it conclusive.

Circumstantial evidence.....Conjecture...Research.....Proof....Knowledge. Fascinating Journey, huh?