The vast majority of iridium-bearing meteorites started life as asteroids, most of them in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter ... Luis’ theory is that sixty-five million years ago a huge asteroid six miles wide smashed into the earth with devastating effect. ibid.
The asteroid may have landed in the sea. ibid.
Following the trail of evidence led [Dr Alan] Hildebrand to the edge of the Caribbean. Horizon: Crater of Death 1997
One of Hildebrand’s suspects was on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. There the state oil company Petrolinus Mexicana had detected a strange circular anomaly in the Earth’s gravity field. Chicxulub, the dead centre of the big round hole, but at the surface there is no sign of a catastrophe. The two hundred kilometre-wide crater is hidden. ibid.
The rock proved to be precisely sixty-five million years old – the age of the mass extinction. Here at last was the first confirmation that Chicxulub was Ground Zero. ibid.
The world burned for days. It was Nature’s equivalent of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust – a nuclear winter. ibid.
On Earth the extinction took decades. It was an ordeal of fire, smoke, cold and heat. But it only took six months of darkness to make the dominant marine animals extinct. ibid.
The Natural History Museum London: within these hallowed halls lies the fossil that first hinted of the origin of birds. Discovered in Germany a hundred years ago superstitious quarry workers thought it was a fallen angel. Archaeopteryx turned out to be something almost as remarkable. Horizon: Dinosaurs in Your Garden, BBC 1998
[Luis] Alvares proposed that an asteroid hit had been so devastating that it wiped out most life on Earth. It was a radical theory. Most palaeontologists found the killer asteroid theory difficult to follow. And their initial reaction was predictable. Horizon: New Asteroid Danger, BBC 1999
Patagonia, Argentina: this is dinosaur country. A land where the rocks are rich with fossils ... New finds here in South America are revolutionising our picture of the prehistoric world. It now seems that in the time of the dinosaurs Patagonia may have been the scene of the bloodiest battle in the history of life. Horizon: Extreme Dinosaurs: The Science of Giants, BBC 2000
This place was once home to the most extreme dinosaurs the world has ever seen. ibid.
The first giant carnivore ever discovered in South America: they called it the Giganotosaurus. ibid.
Giganotosaurus had a skull the length of a man .... Giganotosaurus lived in the Cretaceous, the time of the Giant Long Neck. ibid.
The fossilised remains of hundreds of plant-eating dinosaurs all of the same species who died together carpet an area the size of a football pitch. ibid.
Twelve large meat-eating dinosaurs buried in the same place ... It looked like a pack. ibid.
When this small and broken fossil first appeared it was hailed as one of the most important finds of the decade. Scientists said it was the missing link that supported one of the most controversial theories of modern palaeontology. Yet when they examined it they found buried within it something they had never expected. This is the story of a mysterious fossil that fooled some of the best scientific brains in the world. Horizon: The Dinosaur that Fooled the World, BBC 2002
Everybody knows what wiped out the dinosaurs. Sixty-five million years ago it came from out of space. Scientists claim the whole world burned. Then they say dust blocked out the sun. They say the Earth plunged into deep freeze for months or years. They say it drove the dinosaurs to extinction. But maybe they’ve got it all wrong. Horizon, What Really Killed the Dinosaurs? BBC 2004
The northern hills of Mexico are full of evidence of a mass murder sixty-five million years ago. It’s a crime that for over a decade scientists thought they had already solved. But then a geology professor from Princeton found something what was not supposed to be there. What Gerta Keller had found were just tiny balls of rock. But the implications were profound. Gerta Keller’s claim was so shocking that it has sparked one of the bitterest controversies of recent years. The arguments are so bitter because Gerta Keller has reopened the case which most others considered closed. In doing so she has sparked a scientific civil war. And all because she questioned the accepted theory about what wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists began to investigate a layer of rock formed sixty-five million years ago. It’s seen in mines and rock outcrops all over the world. Below this layer there are lots of dinosaur fossils. Above it there are none. It’s called the K-T boundary. Then in 1972 they discovered a clue in the K-T boundary. A high concentration of an element called Iridium. Such quantities are extremely rare on Earth and usually come from out of space. There was so much iridium, scientists realised the asteroid must have been a staggering ten kilometres in diameter. If the theory was right, the impact would have created a fireball equivalent to ten billion Hiroshima bombs. The shockwave alone would have destroyed life for hundreds of miles around. All they had to prove the theory was to find the evidence. It was Jan Smit who first found traces of the impact. Hidden in the K-T boundary layers he found these tiny balls of rock. Careful analysis revealed the tell-tale signs of their origin. ibid.
It looked as if the world’s forests had spontaneously ignited as the reign of spherules heated the atmosphere ... The impact was also thought to have caused a deluge of vicious acid rain. ibid.
Then there was the final clue from the K-T boundary – a high concentration of fern spores. Ferns flourish when all other plants have been killed off by some environmental devastation. So the predominance of fern spores, known as a Fern Spike, suggested something had wiped out every plant on the planet. So the theory grew up that vast amounts of dust created by the impact must have blocked out the sun. This could have plunged the world into freezing darkness for months or years. Any dinosaurs which had escaped burning either froze or starved to death. (Dinosaur & Extinction) ibid.
3,000,000 years before the impact the dinosaurs were already in trouble ... Did they stabilise or carry on dwindling? What is known is that their environment continued to worsen. For about half a million years before the K-T boundary the world suffered one of its most destructive periods of volcanism ... in what is known as the Deadly Traps ... Maybe the dinosaurs had died out gradually and for many different reasons. ibid.
Nothing could have prepared them for what they’d found. Pete Larson marvelled at the size of the partially exposed killer dinosaur. And nicknamed it Sue after his girlfriend. Horizon: T-Rex: Warrior or Wimp, BBC 2004
The optic nerve ... was big enough to carry a lot of information. The scan seemed to confirm T-Rex did indeed have a key attribute of a skilled predator. ibid.
For years palaeontologists have been looking at the outsides of dinosaurs ... But deep inside the bones we can actually trace dinosaur life. Dr Kristi Curry Rogers, Horizon: My Pet Dinosaur, BBC 2007
A story of a very fast growth rate throughout life history. ibid.
Birds are dinosaurs. ibid.
And so it seems that flight, far from being the reason for the evolution of feathers, may have been a by-product. But with it some dinosaurs were already adapting in ways that would equip them for life after the meteorite impact ... The age of the dinosaurs never actually ended. ibid.
Dinosaurs: masters of the planet for a hundred a sixty million years. The biggest baddest animals ever to walk the Earth. They had claws a foot long and enormous bone-crushing jaws with teeth the size of carving knives. Extinct: A Horizon Guide to Dinosaurs, BBC 2011
We now know more than ever before about what dinosaurs looked like, how fast they grew, their skill as predators, and how they moved. All building a convincing picture of how the dinosaurs came to dominate the Earth for over a hundred and sixty million years. ibid.
The dinosaur fake was a dreadful blow for supporters of the bird theory ... Its front half was a new kind of primitive bird. Fossil hunters flocked to the region where it had been found – and they struck gold. ibid.
For a hundred million years dinosaurs dominated the earth ... Now the seemingly impossible has been discovered – signs of life inside these long dead skeletons. For the first time they have been able to look at the blood of the T-Rex. Horizon: Dinosaurs – The Hunt for Life, BBC 2013
This was a soft fibril piece of a T-Rex. ibid.
Here in western Canada, we have a layer at the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary is about one centimetre thick on average. In Colorado or New Mexico it’s two, two and a half centimetres. So further south in the Caribbean, say Haiti, it’s about a half meter thick. So by 1989 we knew that the source crater had to be somewhere between North and South America … The anomaly is a hundred and eighty kilometres across which is within the range and size for this crater. On the Yucatan Peninsula. Alan Hildebrand
When I first saw it I couldn’t believe it. But then, when it dawned on me what it really meant, I jumped up. It was the most exciting eureka moment. It changed the whole story. Then I realised that if I’m right, everyone else is wrong and Science is wrong about one of the biggest catastrophes in Earth’s history ... The story doesn’t stand up. There’s something fishy about it. Professor Gerta Keller, Princeton University
The impact theory says a rock fell out of the sky and killed everything except for the things it didn’t kill. I don’t think that’s much of an explanation. Dr Norman MacLeod, Natural History Museum London
So what I think of Gerta Keller’s so-called evidence – it makes me sort of mad because none of it holds up. It’s based on arguments which are to my mind barely scientific. Professor Jan Smith, University of Amsterdam