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Science 29 March 1996:
Vol. 271. no. 5257, p. 1806
DOI: 10.1126/science.271.5257.1806
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Research News

Richard A. Kerr

Geologists may have found a piece of the rock that killed the dinosaurs. A sample of 65-million-year-old ooze from the North Pacific has yielded what seems to be a fossil meteorite, just millimeters across. It fell into the sediments at the same geologic instant as a 10-kilometer object struck the Yucatán, probably triggering the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Assuming the rock is a piece of the shattered impacter, its composition implies that the dinosaur killer was an asteroid, not a comet, as some researchers have speculated.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)