It’s taken a long time, but looks like geologist Walter Alvarez and his colleagues, who included his late father and Nobelist Luis Alvarez, at UC Berkeley, have a stellar exhibit with which to assert they’ve finally carried the day. Their big falling rock and not something else like volcanoes did in  T. rex and Triceratops and whatever other big dinosaurs were alive 65 million years ago or so. A huge international team, publishing today in Science. agrees it was an asteroid striking near Central America that ended the age of these terrible lizards and left huge niches for us mammals (and those little flying dinos a.k.a. birds) to radiate into. It’s already a standard in textbooks but this damps the maybes.

Stories:

• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Settled: Dinosaurs done in by asteroid ; This is the kind of balance that makes sense. Perlman in his lede and hed tips readers off to which stance is firmest now, but also provides fairly extensive reply bya die-hard Deccan Traps volcanic cataclysm believer. No other reporter appears to have called any killer-volcanism proponents for a reaction.  It’s a local story for Perlman, a sory the paper has been covering for more than 30 years (more on that after the story list, below).
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Scientists settle on single-asteroid hit as culprit in dinosaurs’ demise ; In a term he borrows from a source, Maugh calls the review panel a “dream team”. His lede: “It’s official.” Maugh might want to reconsider writing that the KT dying “has been called the greatest extinction event of all time.” It must be true that it’s been called that, but maybe not truly. It has also been said a lot that the earlier Permian extinction was far more extensive. But in the space he has, Maugh provides a good, succinct rundown of this controversy’s history.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Scientists conclude asteroid, not volcanoes, wiped out dinosaurs ; USA Today includes a non-scientific poll of readers to make their own opinions known.

*Correction re Vergano Article: By implication it was included among those I say in this post had no word from the pr0-volcanic exctinction school. Just such an objector is quoted in this one. I regret the oversight and error./ cp

• AP: Researchers reassert that impact killed dinosaurs; No byline. Perhaps the wire’s editors feel that this new news is not so newsy. By now, after all, that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs is close to cliche. This perhaps is why NYTimes didn’t cover it?
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: A theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All ; Fine description here of the immediate, awful repercussions of the impact around the globe.
• Guardian – Vikram Dodd: Dinosaurs were killed off by Isle of Wight-Sized asteroid, scientists say / After studyng 20 years of data, panel of 41 scientists rule out volcanic explosions as cause of dinosaurs’ demise ; Good one: the conclusion “will sound more than just a bit familiar to most schoolchildren who paid attention in science class.”
• BBC – Paul Rincon: Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed ; Hmmm. This says the results were discussed at the Lunar and Planetary Conference in Texas. A glance at the program doesn’t show it, but must be true.  That’s where Rincon has been this week.
• Space.com – Leonard David: “Rock-solid’ case: Asteroid killed the dinosaurs  / Scientists say the debate over cause of the ancient catastrophe is settled ; David, too, is at the Lunar and Planetary Conference – and notes that it was at this meeting that actual scar of hte impact, at Chicxulub in Mexico, was first made public.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Huge asteroid impact did spell the end for dinosaurs, experts say ;
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Dinosaurs wiped out by asteroid impact that turned earth into a ‘hellish’ place ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire : Dinosaurs WERE wiped out by an asteroid crashing into Earth ; It’s unclear whether this story benefited from calls to authors to check quotes and get more from the authors beyond what is in press releases. However, as is common at the Mail, the story on line is lavish with a variety of illustration.
• … could do more…

I have some satisfaction at this, by the way. As a professional reporter, I do try to maintain disinterested objectivity. But when one gets a semi-scoop, it’s hard not to feel a fondness for the prospect it might actually be, you know … true. On May 29, 1979, I wrote a front page story for the San Francisco Chronicle on the astounding conclusion, presented at an American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington DC, that most likely an asteroid impact or just possibly a nearby supernova explosion – something from space at any rate – killed the dinosaurs. I had gotten word of it earlier and spent a lot of time preparing. The Chronicle was not alone in print the day the news broke,  but had held it to honor the embargo. Ours was the biggest package in the media right out of the gate. The wires had it, the NY Times had a piece derived I think (no byline anyway) from wires, and several other outlets did too. A bit later, during the first week of January, 1980, the team followed it up in San Francisco at the AAAS meeting by saying they’d taken the supernova off their list of culprits. But the asteroid with its telltale trace of iridium  was their declared, top candidate  for the KT extinction all along.

Coverage generally dates the debate to 1980 and the AAAS presentation plus publication in Science, but that’s not right. It’s May, 1979. I just re-read the old clip to be sure. And if you’re curious, a scholar of science writing has put together a bibliography, here, giving dates of other pubs that year in both press and technical literature.

Grist for the Mill:

• NSF Press Release ; U. Texas – Austin Press Release ; Imperial College London Press Release ; UC San Diego Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

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