The day the dinosaurs died (2019)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

by Petiver • 4 years ago

65 17 4 years ago

newyorker.com

pfdietz• 4 years ago

This has already been linked 6 times on HN. Also: 2019.

dang• 4 years ago

Only one significant thread though:

The Day the Dinosaurs Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19526679 - March 2019 (69 comments)

plus

The Day the Dinosaurs Died (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240889 - Aug 2021 (3 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

p.s. Year added–thanks!

Hayvok• 4 years ago

This didn’t get a ton of discussion in 2021 when it was reposted—does anyone know how the claims/research have held up in the paleontology community?

DannyBee• 4 years ago

Looking at the wikipedia article/etc, it looks like the answer is "reasonably well"

IE repeated papers in Nature, no obvious rebuttals/etc, invited talks at lots of places.

goatlover2• 4 years ago

The obvious rebuttal would be that other animals survived that day, and it's hard to believe that no non-avian dinosaurs would have been adequately sheltered across the entire planet. The land masses didn't become entirely devoid of life, which one would think would be the case for something that could kill off the dinosaurs in a day across the world.

stevenwoo2• 4 years ago

This was the subject of a 2022 BBC documentary https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016djt this had quite a bit of animation and interviews with the scientists discussed in the article in case one likes video or wants to share this with kids. The DePalma fellow is a great interview subject.

aaronharnly• 4 years ago

Cool thank you! It seems in the US (where it was renamed “Dinosaur Apocalypse”) the options to watch it are:

1. Amazon Prime Video - $6 for two episodes https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Apocalypse/dp/B09Y5P3Y5Q

2. With a PBS online membership, which is pay what you want. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/dinosaur-apocalypse/epi...

irrational• 4 years ago

Well... I did find it on the high seas.

stevenwoo2• 4 years ago

Be careful of watching television broadcast elsewhere first on PBS, they sometimes edit for time. I know they cut down almost every episode of Call the Midwife (about 55-58 minute originally) to make it possible to fit the intro and outro commercials so the whole package fits into their broadcast schedule and these edited versions of the show are the ones on the region 1 DVDs most recently. This documentary was broadcast as a single episode but I have not looked into any changes made.

sircastor• 4 years ago

About 10 years ago, RadioLab did a live tour called “Apocalyptical” where the main story was this very premise. It was fascinating and kind of horrible to think about.

As a kid the asteroid theory was relatively new, and we envisioned it in the context of a Nuclear winter - which was also en-vogue in a way. To think of it as an event happening in a matter of hours is shocking.

goatlover2• 4 years ago

Some of the dinosaurs must have been sheltered in valleys, water or whatever. I have a really hard time believing all the non-avian ones died out in a few hours, but other land animals survived. A few years from blotted-out sun makes more sense.

A few hours is just too hellish to think any land animals could survive, since it would have to take out all dinosaurs no matter their location, or what sort of shelter they had. Which means the same conditions would have applied to reptiles, mammals, bird ancestors, etc.

elyseum• 4 years ago

Anybody who can suggest a readable (non-expert) non-fiction book on dinosaurs?

Cupertino95014• 4 years ago

For your B-movie viewing entertainment: Greenland

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7737786/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

features an interstellar comet (those go much faster than regular comets, you know) which has broken into fragments, and they're all slamming into Earth. One of the fragments is bigger than the Chicxulub asteroid, so it's curtains for everybody! Everybody except the special few who've been selected to go to a military bunker near Thule air base in Greenland to ride it out and then rebuild civilization after it's all blown over.

Since all disaster movies have to feature a parent being separated from their child and/or spouse and frantically trying to find them amidst all the chaos, I'm probably not giving anything away when I mention that plot element.

rob74• 4 years ago

Also, Don't Look Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up) - although this is less disaster movie and more black comedy/satire with political commentary.

euroderf• 4 years ago

It's a pretty OK film but it's preaching to the converted.

qikInNdOutReply• 4 years ago

Ah, the lava and volcanism caused extinction were out in full force back then. The idea, that a large scale, energy intensive asteroid impact into a liquid body, may enhance vulcanism on the oppossing side of the earth, by virtue of a lava-shockwave tsunami from below was what came of it?

Imagine a spherical carrying medium, through which a circular shockwave races. At the other end, were it will crash into itself, it will create a overpressure spike, which directs force inwards and outwards. This spike would have come out were today the philipines and south east asia reside.

Back then there was mostly ocean. https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66

So why was volcanism so off ?

The continued volcanism did prolong the hellscape making it the extinction event it was.

elevaet• 4 years ago

The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs
a fiery plume, reached halfway to the moon
fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests
tsunamis, acid rain
After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze

An almost unimaginable scale of destruction. It's mind-blowing that life continued at all. I would love to know more about how life prevailed through this period, how anything made it through this extreme bottleneck.

The day the dinosaurs died (2019)

Related Stories