Will we ever get a solid answer on what killed the dinosaurs?
According to a new "K-T Boundary Dream Team" comprising 41 international experts, including geophysicists and paleontologists, yes, the question has been settled: An asteroid is indeed to blame.
For years, scientists have argued over different theories of what killed the dinos--including one hypothesis that has gained ground recently, which suggests that massive volcanic activity in India's Deccan Traps wiped them out 65 million years ago.
However, the latest expert panel stuck to the asteroid theory, saying a massive impact wiped out the dinos and more than half of the Earth's other species. After studying all the available data on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, the panel concluded that the catastrophic event was caused by a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck Earth at an angle of 90 degrees and a speed of about 12.4 miles per second – about 20 ...
