WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., March 9 (UPI) -- A U.S. scientist says he's found more evidence an asteroid that crashed into the Earth 65 million years ago ended the age of the dinosaurs.
Purdue University Professor Jay Melosh refutes recent alternative hypotheses to the dinosaur extinction.
Melosh is among a panel of 41 experts from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan that evaluated new core samples from ocean and land sites.
"We find that alternative hypotheses are inadequate to explain the abrupt mass extinction and that the Chicxulub impact hypothesis has grown stronger than ever," Melosh said. "The impact hypothesis has been widely accepted by the scientific community, but there has still been some debate, and we continue to examine the evidence."
About 20 years ago an impact crater more than 125 miles wide was discovered in Yucatan, Mexico, and is thought to have caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago. However, some scientists suggest that event occurred 300,000 years earlier and could not have been the cause. Those scientists suggest active volcanoes led to global cooling and acid rainfall that killed the dinosaurs.
The new findings are reported in the journal Science.
