The Dinosaurs Died in Spring - Science History Institute

9/23/24, 5:21 AM The Dinosaurs Died in Spring | Science History Institute
MAY 2, 2024 | INVENTIONS & DISCOVERIES
The Dinosaurs Died

in Spring
Science that ushered in a new epoch
also revealed stunning details from
Earth’s distant past.
by George BorgRoger Turner
You see the strangest things in the South

Dakota countryside, near Murdo, South
Dakota, Carol Highsmith, 2009.
Library of Congress
One spring day 66.043 million years ago, a meteorite smashed into limestone at
the ocean’s edge near the present-day Yucatán Peninsula.
The rock, at least six miles in width, rushed toward the planet at 46,000 miles per
hour, too fast to have been seen by the dinosaurs it annihilated. Shattering rocks
to a depth of 18 miles, it unleashed a tsunami and set wildfires for hundreds of
miles around. A thousand miles from the site of impact, a cloud of gas heated to
311°F swept across the Yucatán shoreline.
Vast amounts of rock blasted into the stratosphere and rained back down as
molten droplets, called tektites, heating the planet’s atmosphere and roasting
animals that could not find shelter in water or deep burrows. Sulfur unleashed
from shattered limestone combined with oxygen to form thick clouds that dimmed
the sun’s rays and set off storms of acid rain around the globe. Ecosystems that
survived the initial impact collapsed.
The chain reaction set off by the asteroid strike eventually snuffed out 99.9999% of
life on the planet. The ash and bits of meteorite left behind would settle into a thin,
distinctive gray line in the earth, marking a mass grave and the dividing line
between periods of life on the planet.
How do we know such precise details about the worst day in Earth’s history so
many millions of years ago?
Partly it comes from scientists working together across disciplines. What began as
a paleontological puzzle attracted the expertise of ecologists, physicists,
computer modelers, and atmospheric scientists. Some of the most surprising
discoveries came from nuclear chemistry, a discipline whose origins can be traced
to Henri Becquerel’s 1896 discovery of radioactivity. By decoding the chemical
remnants of ancient events, scientists have probed the planet’s primordial history
in often mind-boggling detail.
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Such achievements, however, were neither planned nor predictable in 1896. They
were reached only after a series of twists and turns navigated by generations of
scientists, some poring over the latest electronic innovations, others interrogating
peculiar rock samples from around the world.
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How Old Is Earth?

“It is perhaps a little indelicate to ask of our Mother Earth her age,” wrote Arthur
Holmes in 1913. But Holmes, eventually recognized as the father of the geologic
timescale, was nearly alone in his bashfulness. As geologist Brent Dalrymple
makes clear in The Age of the Earth, people had had the effrontery to ask Earth
her age for thousands of years.
The ancient Hindus, for example, calculated the world to be about two billion
years old. The Chaldean rulers of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the period 612 to
538 BCE held that Earth had emerged from chaos more than two million years
earlier.
Others pegged Earth as far younger. Most likely during the 2nd millennium BCE,
Persian religious reformer Zoroaster put the estimate at 12,000 years old; Hebrew
and Christian calculations produced ages that were younger still. The probable
founder of the Christian chronological tradition, Syrian saint and Christian
apologist Theophilus of Antioch (ca. 115–180), estimated Earth had been created
5,732 years earlier (5529 BCE), based on a study of Scripture. Subsequent
Christian estimates, drawing on various biblical texts, all attributed a young age
to Earth, around 6,000 years. Since time in the Bible is measured by day or
generation, Christian chronologists typically estimated the time elapsed between
milestones, such as the Flood or the birth of Abraham, by adding up generations
and the reigns of various rulers.
In the early modern period, natural philosophers began incorporating non-

biblical data from astronomy—the most prestigious science at the time—into their
estimates. Thus, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the German discoverer of the
planets’ elliptical orbits, used orbital data to calculate that Earth was created in
3993 BCE. Prelate and biblical scholar James Ussher (1581–1656), combined
biblical sources, historical accounts, and data on astronomical cycles to estimate
a creation date of 4004 BCE.
In the West, the first estimate based solely on data from nature was made by
French diplomat and amateur naturalist Benoît de Maillet (1656–1738). De
Maillet’s calculation assumed sea levels had been declining steadily since Earth’s
beginning. This assumption was based on the discovery of seashells in inland
mountains and the ideas of de Maillet’s philosophical guru, René Descartes, who
held that the planets were swirling in a vortex and could spin off water in the
melee. Estimating the rate of ocean decline at 3 inches per century, de Maillet
concluded Earth was at least two billion years old. This age represented a radical
departure from the youthful Earth determined from biblical sources and launched
the modern practice of scientific age determination.
The use of a continuous

natural process—declining sea
levels, in de Maillet’s case—as
a clock to measure Earth’s
age became the standard
approach in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Other clocks
included salt accumulation in
the oceans; the slowing of
Earth’s rotation through tidal
dissipation of energy;
sediment accumulation, based
on measuring the thicknesses
of rock strata; and the alleged
cooling of Earth since an early
molten state, an idea
proposed by physicist Lord
Kelvin. Though these scientific
estimates varied greatly in
approach, they all attributed
much older ages to Earth than
had the Scripture-based
chronologies.
The planet’s age was of

particular importance to early
Descendants of Japheth, Noah’s third son, from the Nuremberg Chronicle,
geologists as their field took completed by Hartmann Schedel in 1493. Christian scholars estimated Earth’s age in
part by adding up the ages of biblical figures.
form in the 18th and 19th Library of Congress
centuries. Variations in rock
strata and fossils appeared to mark different periods and transitions in the
planet’s geological activity, climate, and the life forms it supported. But without a
definitive age, how could geologists know they had accounted for all such
divisions since Earth formed? Conversely, when they attempted to calculate the
durations of these divisions, what could they use to check their math?
The age of Earth would serve as a useful constraint to address both questions: the
sum of geologic eras could not be greater than Earth’s total age, and conversely,
if Earth’s age were greater than the sum of all known geologic eras, it followed
that some eras had not yet been discovered. Thus, the millennia-spanning, largely
religious quest to date the planet gained a scientific impetus.
Geologists’ preferred method for measuring geological time, including the age of
Earth, involved the study of sedimentary rock. Sediment accumulation means
geologic activity—the ticking of the clock. Over time, sediments are deposited on
the floors of aquatic bodies. This process is offset by erosion. The overall rate of
accumulation represents the balance between deposition and erosion.
With a reliable rate of accumulation, it would be a relatively simple task for

geologists to measure deposits and calculate the total time since sediments had
started forming in the oceans

and seas and thus establish a
lower limit on Earth’s age. But
no one could agree on what
that rate should be. Estimates
varied wildly depending on
which rock formations and
accumulation rates were used
as inputs. The only thing
geologists could agree on was
that Earth was very, very old,
on the order of 100 million
years, if not much older.
The study of sedimentary rock

appealed to geologists, at
least in part, because they
could use data and concepts
from their own field rather Early representation of geological periods assigned to strata, by French scientists
Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, 1811.
than borrow them from David Rumsey Map Collection
physics or chemistry, as
ocean-salt accumulation and other methods had. But the existence of these
alternatives, as well as the obvious inconclusiveness of the geologists’ preferred
method, stoked interdisciplinary tensions.
Ever since James Hutton published his 1788 manifesto for uniformitarianism—the
theory that Earth had been shaped not by the cataclysmic events noted in
Scripture but by the gradual effects of processes like those we see today—
geologists had granted themselves large timespans to account for the thick
accumulations of sedimentary rocks and for the numerous evolutionary changes
evident in the fossil record. As Hutton famously put it in the modestly titled Theory
of the Earth, “the result . . . of our present enquiry is that we find no vestige of a
beginning, no prospect of an end.”
The trouble started when, in the late 19th century, the world’s most famous
physicist, Lord Kelvin boldly proclaimed that his calculations proved Earth could
not be more than 24 million years old. This claim flew in the face of geological
evidence and evolutionary theory. As a result, geologists scorned the theory and
resisted the intrusion of physical methods onto their turf for decades.
Kelvin’s calculations were based on his research in thermodynamics. He argued

that all the energy in the solar system, including that contained in the sun and
Earth, would necessarily dissipate over time. The celestial bodies were like
glowing coals slowly cooling in the void of space. It followed that Earth had been
hottest at the time of formation, and so its age could be estimated based on
hypotheses, which Kelvin put forth, about the rate of cooling.
Detail of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers map by Harold Fisk showing the changing course of the lower Mississippi River over time and its effects on the surrounding landscape, 1945.
David Rumsey Map Collection
Yet as some geologists pointed out, Kelvin’s assumptions were seriously flawed.
The resulting dispute got bitter.
“The fascinating impressiveness of rigorous mathematical analysis, with its

atmosphere of precision and elegance, should not blind us to the defects of the
premises that condition the whole process,” deadpanned University of Chicago
geologist T. C. Chamberlin before proceeding to demolish Kelvin’s arguments in
an 1899 paper. Chamberlin suggested Kelvin’s assumption that there is no source
of new heat in the solar system was especially problematic. Though Chamberlin
did not mention it, the assumption had effectively been overturned already by
Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896.
Chemistry has typically been considered the study of the composition and
transformation of substances. Though the triumph of atomism in the 19th century
incorporated the study of bonding between atoms into these traditional concerns,
the nucleus remained the province of physics rather than chemistry. Becquerel’s
discovery of radioactivity upset such disciplinary distinctions, however, because
the decay of one element into another changes the composition of substances, the
bread-and-butter of chemists.
The branch of study that emerged, nuclear chemistry, also eroded geology’s
disciplinary independence from physics and chemistry, though in a way that
proved more acceptable to geologists than Kelvin’s theory of Earth’s age. For the
discovery of radioactivity not only undercut the famous physicist’s theory—by
identifying a source of new heat in the energy released by decay—it also provided
the key to quantifying the geologic timescale.
Between 1902 and 1903 physicists Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy together
proposed that each type of radioactive element decays at a unique and unvarying
rate. This is the concept of the radioactive half-life. If their theory were correct, it
made every such element a potential clock for measuring geologic time: the
conversion of one element into another by decay would act like sand steadily
falling between the chambers of an hourglass.
A particularly important kind

of radioactive decay to early-
20th-century physicists was
the breakdown of uranium
isotopes U-235 and U-238 into
lead isotopes Pb-207 and Pb-
206, respectively. With half-
lives of about 710 million and
4.5 billion years, the rate of
uranium decay was
sufficiently long that it could
be used to measure
timescales on the order of
Photographic plate used by Henri Becquerel to discover radioactivity in 1896.
billions of years. Becquerel wrapped the plate in black paper and placed uranium salts on top.
Despite being covered, the plate reacted to what the scientist concluded was
radiation passing through the paper.
With this discovery, Kelvin’s AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
theory was finished for good,

and scientists seemed to have an accurate clock by which to measure Earth’s age.
Now they needed to learn how to read it properly.
A crucial step in using radioactivity to date the planet required the separation and
accurate measurement of the isotopes found inside minerals. Enter a young
Harvard post-doc named Alfred O. C. Nier and his mass spectrometer.
Mass spectrometers separate isotopes according to mass using a combination of

electric and magnetic fields. In 1936 Nier married a two-ton electromagnet to a 5-
kilowatt electric generator to create a mass spectrometer powerful enough to
cleanly separate isotopes of heavy elements, including lead and uranium, the
grains of sand marking off Earth’s age. The instrument caught the attention of
retired geologist Alfred Lane, the chairman of the National Research Council’s
Committee for the Measurement of Geologic Time and the man who steered Nier
into geochronology. (Nier found the chairman “peculiar,” but a grant from the NRC
likely helped overcome any doubts he had about the committee’s project.)
Meanwhile, Nier was establishing rapport with Harvard chemist Gregory Baxter, a
student of Nobel laureate Theodore Richards. Baxter, like Richards before him,
was a world leader in measuring atomic weights by chemical methods. For
someone looking to measure geologic time through the half-life of uranium,
Baxter was a good connection to make. Over the course of their careers, Richards
and Baxter had amassed lead samples of high purity, painstakingly refined from
ores. Nier found his instrument could rapidly analyze isotope abundances in these
samples and boasted that he could do in an hour what it took chemists weeks to
do.
By the 1930s, dating methods based on Nier’s technology had won over all but the
most hardened geologists. In 1939 he designed a streamlined spectrometer with
lower power requirements; its ease of use and indisputable accuracy led to the
increasing application of nuclear chemistry to geological problems. (Nier’s
innovative mass
spectrometers would also
prove essential for building
the first atomic bomb during
the Manhattan Project.)
More important changes were

in the offing. A year earlier
Nier had discovered the lead
in Richard and Baxter’s
samples wasn’t as uniform as
it might appear. These ores
consisted of a mixture of
radiogenic lead—that is, lead
generated over the course of
Earth’s history from the decay
of uranium—and primeval
lead, which had been present
at the time of Earth’s
formation. Alfred Nier holding a mass spectrometer’s flight tube, ca. May 1940.
Courtesy Roger Turner
Whereas primeval lead had
fixed ratios of lead isotopes, the ratios in radiogenic lead varied as a result of
uranium decay. Nier discovered these variations in the Harvard samples, and
hypothesized that they were caused by the addition of radiogenic lead to
primeval lead.
Arthur Holmes, the ringleader of geochronology by this time, used Nier’s data to
develop a geologic timescale, attaching ages to the periods and epochs
geologists had ordered previously by comparing strata and fossils. In the years
that followed, Holmes and others threw all delicacy to the wind, using Nier’s
discovery of primeval lead to attempt calculations of Earth’s total age.
By determining how much radiogenic lead had been added to the primeval lead
through uranium decay since Earth’s crust had formed, Holmes found he could, in
principle, infer the corresponding time elapsed.
After one such calculation in 1946, Holmes wrote excitedly to Nier that he had
calculated the planet’s age to be about “3 thousand million years.” The average of
his calculations was in fact 3,015 million, but, as he jokingly noted, “we can . . .
afford to neglect the odd 15.! [sic].” (Time is cheap in geology!) He considered this
calculation to be the “first really reliable estimate of the age of the earth” and
congratulated Nier on having made the feat possible.
Despite Holmes’s optimism, however, the debate over Earth’s age wouldn’t be
settled for another decade. The problem was that Holmes was working with lead
samples that were stand-ins for primeval lead. While geologically very old, these
samples originated sometime after Earth’s formation and hence had been subject
to uranium decay. That meant these samples did not necessarily reflect Earth’s
initial isotopic composition and, as a result, led to an underestimation of the time

elapsed.
Where could scientists find truly primeval lead? Why not outer space, where
remnants of the original bits of matter from which Earth had formed still drifted
about? More specifically, a meteorite whose uranium content, relative to lead,
was so small that no significant decay could have occurred since it was formed.
It so happened that 50,000 years ago an errant asteroid tore through the desert
sky and blasted out three-quarters of a mile of scrubland near Flagstaff, Arizona,
scattering iron-rich debris that is now collectively known as the Canyon Diablo
meteorite. Nier’s fellow Manhattan Project alum, University of Chicago
geochemistry professor Harrison Brown and his post-doc, Clair Patterson,
reasoned that both meteorites and Earth must have formed at the same time and
from the same precursor matter. Therefore, such a meteorite could serve as
representative of the primeval lead incorporated into Earth at the time of its
formation. Find primeval lead in the Canyon Diablo debris, and scientists might
finally nail down Earth’s age for good.
Meteor Crater, Arizona, July 2012.

Wikimedia Commons/Tsaiproject
Patterson was just the man for the job. For his graduate work, also with Brown, he
had been tasked with determining the lead isotope composition of zircons. Zircons
are an extremely stable crystal species whose lead content is almost entirely the
product of radioactive decay. (Other kinds of rocks were more vulnerable to
contamination by non-radiogenic lead).
Unfortunately, zircon’s virtue was also a vice for Patterson—the amount of lead
present is almost impossibly meager—1,000 times less than in any mineral seen
before. The work infuriated Patterson; his exacting measurements didn’t make
any sense when calibrated against rocks of known ages. Eventually he realized
trace lead was drifting into his lab like a ghost, haunting his carefully prepared
samples. To counter this contamination, he developed a rigorously
decontaminated “clean lab,” which was a novelty at the time.
Patterson put this know-how to use in measuring the lead in the Canyon Diablo
remnants. Using a modified, Nier-type spectrometer, he and Brown confirmed
that it was as free of radiogenic isotopes as they expected. They further
demonstrated that certain

samples of deep-sea lead,
which they argued were
representative of modern
Earth lead, were as old as
Canyon Diablo and a few
other meteorites as well.
Mathematical analysis
revealed this age to be 4.6
billion years.
Patterson recalled the

experience in 1995: Fragment of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which struck present-day Arizona 50,000
years ago.
Wikimedia Commons
Now, there’s a bunch of
equations that these
atomic physicists—Al Nier, for example—calculated. It’s so marvelous how
they worked all this stuff out. And if we only knew what the isotopic
composition of primordial lead was in the Earth at the time it was formed,
we could take that number and stick it into this marvelous equation we had.
And you could turn the crank and, blip, out would come the age of the
Earth.
The Brown–Patterson age is still accepted today. Decades after Kelvin’s contested
amputation of geologic time, physics and geology were reconciled: the physicists
got their mathematical rigor, and the geologists got their long timespans. More
importantly, the discovery put to bed two older and grander problems.
First, geology got the number it needed to calibrate the geological timescale.
Geologic time could finally be securely quantified. Second, the Brown–Patterson
age cemented the secularization of Earth’s history and providing a final nail in the
coffin for millennia-old religious concepts of the planet’s origins and the solar
system in which it resides.
As usually happens in science, however, no sooner were these problems solved,

then further ones reared their heads. In this case, an obvious question raised by
the meteorite connection was, where do meteorites come from in the first place?
The Case of the Martian Meteorites

Patterson and Brown had bet on a common origin of meteorites and Earth in
determining the latter’s age. But the study of meteorites would reveal an even
more direct connection between Earth and the solar system, showing the planet
was engaged in an eons-long conversation with its neighbors.
Once again, Al Nier’s wizardry with mass spectrometry played a key role, allowing
scientists to listen in on the interplanetary exchange.
After an exceptionally successful post-doc at Harvard, in 1938 Nier took up an

assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota, where he obtained tenure
almost immediately. About the time he became chair of the physics department in
1953, he developed an interest in meteorites, looking at how cosmic rays in space

alter their isotopic composition.
With American interest in rocketry taking off after the Sputnik launch in 1957, Nier
began to obsess about how to apply mass spectrometry to space exploration. He
focused on miniaturizing the mass spectrometer for space missions to other
planets, where the instrument could be used to analyze the compositions of their
atmospheres.
In his efforts to convince NASA senior managers of the feasibility of

miniaturization, Nier built an instrument concealed in a briefcase and took it to
NASA headquarters to get the support of friendly “underlings” there. By chance
Nier ran into NASA’s associate administrator for research coming out of an
elevator. Nier plopped open the case and gave him a demonstration on the spot.
“A crowd gathered around to see this little instrument in an attaché case,” Nier
later remembered, and the “little sales job” eventually paid off when he was
tapped for the 1976 Viking mission to Mars.
Alfred Nier’s briefcase mass spectrometer.

Richard Anderson
Nier was responsible for planning and executing the elemental and isotopic
measurements of the Martian atmosphere during the descent of the spacecraft.
Some of the most important discoveries of the Mars missions would come from
this work, including the discovery of isotopic signatures, characteristic of the
Martian atmosphere, that would reveal a stunning connection between Earth and
the Red Planet—some meteorites found on Earth were Martian.
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This time, the detective who cracked the case was not Nier, but Donald Bogard of
NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
In the late 1970s Bogard began studying an unusual category of meteorite, called
shergottite, that appeared to be very young in geological terms—only about 200
million years old. Bogard came to this remarkably young age by measuring the
argon produced by decay of potassium-40, a technique that had been pioneered
by Nier in the 1940s to study terrestrial minerals. The potassium-argon technique,
as it was known, was extremely useful for measuring the ages of young rocks, and
so provided an essential complement to the uranium-lead method, which was
better suited to older rocks. Bogard concluded that the young ages reflected
recent crystallization formed in the intense heat of two asteroids colliding.
Composite image of Mars’s Valles Marineris canyon system taken by Viking Orbiter 1.
NASA/USGS
However, one such meteorite, named Elephant Moraine 79001 after its discovery
site in Antarctica, featured unusually large amounts of melt glass, presumably
from a particularly hot impact. With his colleague Pratt Johnson, Bogard
measured the argon content of the glass, which yielded an apparent age of six
billion years old. How could the melted parts be so much older than the rest of the
meteorite? Beginning to suspect an unusual origin, Bogard and Johnson
compared the argon and other gas contents of the melt to the Martian
atmosphere data from Viking. Lo and behold, they matched!
Bob Pepin, a colleague of Nier’s at Minnesota, and coworkers would soon show
that the 15N/14N ratio of the melt also matched Nier’s data. These results could be
explained by a violent impact on the Martian surface that had melted the rock
and thereby trapped atmospheric gases in the process of ejecting the rock from
the surface. The first interplanetary meteorites had been discovered.
Ironically, Bogard had narrowly missed discovering the Martian origins of these
rocks as a graduate student at the University of Arkansas in the 1960s. At the time,
it was assumed that meteorites came exclusively from asteroids. Indeed,
theoretical studies indicated that a force sufficient to eject a rock from Mars
would vaporize the rock in the process.
“It never crossed our mind that these were from a totally different parent body!”
he later recalled. “Sometimes you miss serendipity in science.”
Delayed though it may have

been, the discovery expanded
the geological horizons
initiated by isotope
geochronology even further.
Brown and Patterson had
shown that Earth and
meteorites had a common
origin. Elephant Moraine
79001 had now revealed that
the planets, once formed,
were not like the detached
Cross-section of Elephant Moraine 79001 revealing dark glass inclusions used to
gods of Epicurus’s imagining, confirm its Martian origin, ca. 1980s.
Wikimedia Commons/NASA
but bodies in interaction with
each other through the
exchange of matter.
This discovery was not entirely revolutionary, for it, in a most unexpected fashion,
comforted Hutton’s uniformitarianism: Earth was shaped not (just) by sporadic
dramatic events, but by a steady stream of interactions with the rest of the solar
system. More importantly, it raised further questions, as do all important
discoveries in science. If rocks could voyage from planet to planet, might those
vessels carry more than interesting minerals and isotopic ratios?
Scientists began to wonder whether life, previously considered an actor in a purely

terrestrial drama—chemical or divine—had sprouted instead from astral seeds,
like the humans in the movie Prometheus. The discovery of meteorites from Mars
fueled studies in the 1980s and 1990s that would detect possible traces of life on
such meteorites, suggesting that perhaps life could move between planets on
meteorites and challenging prevailing theories of exobiology. Unwittingly, the
scientific effort to ask Mother Earth her age had morphed into a discipline-
exploding expansion of geology to cosmological proportions.
What Killed Off the Dinosaurs?

The 20th century’s most publicly compelling geochemical investigation of
meteorites emerged from economic anxiety.
As declining support for nuclear weapons threatened their funding in the 1970s,
the U.S. national labs cast about for other research projects. At the Lawrence
Berkeley Lab (LBL) at the University of California, Berkeley, the division of nuclear
chemistry developed analytical techniques for answering archeological and
historical questions. One of the key instrumentalists there was a scientist named
Helen Michel.
Michel was first enthralled by chemistry after watching an experiment blow up on

her sixth-grade teacher. After graduating high school, she set out for a career in
commercial chemistry, but was stymied by the sexism of prospective employers.
Instead she enrolled at her hometown university and joined what was then the
Radiation Laboratory as a student assistant. After a brief and discouraging stint in
graduate school, she returned to the Rad Lab, where she proved herself an expert
instrumental chemist, especially in a cutting-edge technique—neutron activation
analysis (NAA).
In NAA, neutrons bombard a sample, transforming some of the stable isotopes

into radioactive ones. As the radioactive isotopes decay, they emit telltale gamma
rays with energy levels unique to each isotope. The method is particularly useful
for detecting and quantifying trace elements.
In the late 1970s Michel set this technology to a range of mysteries, including the
debunking of a long-treasured hoax in the university’s collection, a brass plate
purportedly cast by Francis Drake on his arrival to California in 1579. Michel’s
analysis revealed the plate couldn’t be more than a century old. But her use of
NAA to measure iridium in a thin layer of rock would prove far more
consequential.
Helen Michel (standing) with (from left) anthropologist Betty Holtzman and Berkeley Lab colleagues Isadore
Perlman and Frank Asaro.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Doug McWilliams
The question of what drove the dinosaurs into extinction was then a lively scientific
debate. Some paleontologists thought the question was unsolvable. More than a
few 1970s children’s books concluded with a line like, “What killed the dinosaurs?
We may never know.” Those entranced by this mystery split into several camps.
One leading theory suggested dinosaurs had died off gradually, possibly the
result of long-term environmental changes. Another suggested emissions from
massive volcanic eruptions had quickly soured the global climate, with the
theory’s proponents pointing to the Deccan Traps, an enormous deposit of

volcanic rocks in India created roughly 65 million years ago.
An alternative theory was advanced by Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez and his
father, Nobel laureate physicist, LBL professor emeritus, and Manhattan Project
alum Luis Alvarez. The Alvarezes believed a killer asteroid had smashed into the
planet and brought a sudden and catastrophic end to 75% of the world’s species.
Their theory was grounded in a puzzling half-inch-thick layer of clay in a gorge

near Gubbio, Italy. On either side of the clay were thick limestone deposits
studded with iron minerals and the fossilized shells of tiny aquatic animals called
foraminifera. The Italian geologist Isabella Premoli Silva had tracked the evolution
of these “forams” during the late Cretaceous period in the limestone below the
clay. The abundance of tiny shells testified to the thriving conditions for life. Above
that was a layer of clay where no fossilized shells were preserved. Next above that
layer in geological time, the fossil record began again, showing just a single
species of microscopic foram initially, slowly proliferating into many new species
as geological time progressed.
The younger Alvarez had

encountered the clay layer
while attempting to use the
forams, radiometric dating,
and the iron deposits—a sort
of fossil compass—to
reconstruct a 100-million-year
record of changes in Earth’s
magnetic field. He took a
sample of this clay boundary
home and showed it to his
dad. The elder Alvarez was
entranced by the puzzle: why
had the limestone-making
mechanism in this area
apparently turned off and
then turned back on?
The first step to answering

that question was to know
how long it might have taken
for this deposit to have been Luis Alvarez (left) and Walter Alvarez at the K–Pg Boundary in Bottaccione Gorge,
near Gubbio, Italy.
laid down. An unconventional Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
way to answer that question

again came from the sky.
Cosmic dust is extremely fine material left behind from the formation of the solar
system that continues to rain down on the earth imperceptibly. Its higher
concentration of iridium and other platinum group metals makes it measurable—
with the right kind of tools. One of those tools was close at hand in the LBL’s NAA
team.
The Alvarezes asked LBL colleagues Michel and Frank Asaro to measure the
iridium levels in clay samples from Gubbio and a similar sample from New
Zealand. Michel’s analysis revealed comparatively high concentrations of iridium
in rocks from the geological strata that marked the geological boundary between
the Cretaceous and the Paleogene eras, deposits now known as the K–Pg
boundary. The samples didn’t reveal a steady accumulation of iridium that could
function as a clock—they showed a sudden influx of an element that is usually very
rare on the Earth but known to be in much higher concentrations in some
meteorites.
For the Alvarezes, this was decisive evidence of a killer asteroid, and the popular
press glommed onto their findings. “Comet Fire: Did it doom the dinosaurs?” Time
magazine asked. The idea of annihilation raining down from the heavens was a
provocation to a nation gripped by the nuclear brinkmanship of the Reagan
administration. In Parade magazine Carl Sagan warned Americans of a
cataclysmic nuclear winter, an idea fashioned from the Alvarezes’ theory that
Cretaceous life had been snuffed out by a planet-wide cloud of debris.
But many geologists and

paleontologists found the
theory less compelling.
Evidence from two locations
was hardly enough to support
a global claim. Perhaps
volcanoes or some other
geological process could have
concentrated iridium. More
importantly, where was the
hole? Surely a planet-
transforming meteor must
have left a massive impact
crater?
Nuclear chemistry stepped

into the raging debate.
Further sampling revealed
elevated iridium levels in the
K–Pg boundary at more than
100 sites around the globe.
Scientists investigated other March 1985 edition of Science Digest.
chemical signatures to test the

Alvarez theory. An analysis by J.M. Luck and K.K. Turekian published in 1983 found
that samples from the K–Pg boundary had nearly 1:1 ratios of osmium-187 and
osmium-186, characteristic of meteorites, rather than the ratios of around 10:1
characteristic of rocks in Earth’s crust.
As compelling as this evidence was for the asteroid hypothesis, it could not rule
out volcanoes. Scientists were still split.
The decisive discovery of a suitably massive crater was announced in a paper

published in 1991. This paper brought together multiple strands of evidence. Two
of the paper’s co-authors were geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo,
who had worked for Mexico’s national oil company. In prospecting for oil, they
had gathered magnetic anomaly data and gravity maps that suggested a 110-
mile-wide ring below the surface of the Caribbean Sea at the edge of the Yucatán
Peninsula, near the Mexican town of Chicxulub. Rock samples from oil wells drilled
inside the crater revealed shocked rock and other debris characteristic of a
meteor impact.
Model animation of the Chicxulub crater impact.

University of Arizona Space Imagery Center
Two other co-authors, Adam Hildebrand and William Boynton, had studied the
chemical composition of tektites embedded in the K–Pg boundary near the Brazos
River basin in Texas, 1,000 miles away. Analysis showed these tektites had the
same chemical and isotopic composition as shocked andesite samples from the oil
wells, suggesting this rock was the origin of the ejected material.
Finally, the crater was located in a thick section of limestone, suggesting that the
impact may have produced a huge pulse of carbon dioxide that could have
caused a period of global warming as well. The combination of geological
wreckage and chemical remnants provided compelling evidence in support of the
impact theory.
In the years since, isotopic analysis has also narrowed down the time of the
extinction, even to the season—spring—and revealed the probable role of acid
rain in contributing to global extinction. Most recently, researchers have used
isotopic analysis to find in K–Pg samples the distinctive geochemical signature
produced when sulfur gases interact with ultraviolet light. This suggests the
asteroid’s impact did indeed shoot a massive cloud of aerosols and dust into the
stratosphere, helping set off a deep freeze that led to the mass extinction event
like the nuclear winter Sagan imagined.
In Search of Lost Time

In 2007 philosopher Derek Turner illustrated the limits of scientific knowledge of
the past by means of an analogy:
In my study I have a black-and-white photograph of my grandfather as a

young man, standing in front of a house holding a lunchbox. I sometimes
wonder what, if anything, was in the lunchbox. That is a simple question
about the past that no one will ever be able to answer. Many questions in
historical science are like that: for instance, asking about the colors of the
dinosaurs is just like asking what was in my grandfather’s lunchbox.
Three years later Turner was proven dramatically wrong: paleontologists had
discovered the color—chestnut—of the small theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx,
from the early Cretaceous period (120–131 million years ago). Other species
followed. It turned out that we could know the colors of at least some animals who
lived hundreds of millions of years in the past but not the contents of a lunchbox
just a few decades ago. How was this possible?
Advances in nuclear chemistry and instrumentation have enabled scientists to

reach into the deep past. Techniques such as scanning electron microscopy and
X-ray spectroscopy now allow paleontologists to study microscopic fossil
remnants, including cell organelles and trace metals. In combination with what we
know about the color of current animals, those traces are sufficient to draw
conclusions about what dinosaurs and prehistoric birds looked like, as well as
further conclusions based on them, such as the nature of their habitats.
Unfortunately, no comparable traces remain of the contents of Turner Sr.’s
lunchbox.
Turner characterized his failed prediction as an “epistemic bet against science.”

One moral that may be drawn from the story we’ve told here is that scientific
discoveries do not just tell us how the world is, but often reveal new, unexpected
opportunities for further discovery. This makes betting against science a risky
proposition. The spectacular success of nuclear chemistry is a case in point:
Neither Becquerel nor Rutherford and Soddy could have predicted that the
discovery of isotopes would ultimately reveal the cause of the dinosaurs’ demise or
the Martian origin of certain meteorites. Nor would Hutton have dreamed that
meteorites, of all things, would indeed provide a “vestige of a beginning” for
Earth. On the other hand, scientists are, to some extent, at the mercy of what they
discover, and so some problems might never be solved. We may indeed never be
able to know what was in that lunchbox.
Advances in nuclear chemistry revealed new knowledge pathways to unlock the

secrets held in rocks. But to exploit them, scientists like Al Nier, Clair Patterson, and
Helen Michel had to be creative in a way that illustrates the painstaking and far-
flung nature of modern science: they had to not just solve theoretical puzzles and
make careful observations, but to obsess about arcane details of instrument
design and look far and wide for the right rocks to probe.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct Alfred Nier’s relationship to
Gregory Baxter and Theodore Richards and to clarify how isotopic ratios of
primordial and radiogenic lead were used as a dating method.
George Borg is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s

Department of Philosophy. From 2021 to 2023 he was National Science Foundation
SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow (award 2104623) and Beckman Center
postdoctoral fellow in residence at the Science History Institute.
Roger Turner is the curator of instruments and artifacts in the Science History
Institute Museum.

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9/23/24, 5:21 AM The Dinosaurs Died in Spring | Science History Institute

MAY 2, 2024 | INVENTIONS & DISCOVERIES

The Dinosaurs Died

by George BorgRoger Turner

You see the strangest things in the South

How Old Is Earth?

In the early modern period, natural philosophers began incorporating non-

The use of a continuous

The planet’s age was of

With a reliable rate of accumulation, it would be a relatively simple task for

started forming in the oceans

The study of sedimentary rock

Kelvin’s calculations were based on his research in thermodynamics. He argued

“The fascinating impressiveness of rigorous mathematical analysis, with its

A particularly important kind

theory was finished for good,

Mass spectrometers separate isotopes according to mass using a combination of

More important changes were

initial isotopic composition and, as a result, led to an underestimation of the time

Meteor Crater, Arizona, July 2012.

demonstrated that certain

Patterson recalled the

As usually happens in science, however, no sooner were these problems solved,

The Case of the Martian Meteorites

After an exceptionally successful post-doc at Harvard, in 1938 Nier took up an

1953, he developed an interest in meteorites, looking at how cosmic rays in space

In his efforts to convince NASA senior managers of the feasibility of

Alfred Nier’s briefcase mass spectrometer.

Delayed though it may have

Scientists began to wonder whether life, previously considered an actor in a purely

What Killed Off the Dinosaurs?

Michel was first enthralled by chemistry after watching an experiment blow up on

In NAA, neutrons bombard a sample, transforming some of the stable isotopes

theory’s proponents pointing to the Deccan Traps, an enormous deposit of

Their theory was grounded in a puzzling half-inch-thick layer of clay in a gorge

The younger Alvarez had

The first step to answering

way to answer that question

But many geologists and

Nuclear chemistry stepped

chemical signatures to test the

The decisive discovery of a suitably massive crater was announced in a paper

Model animation of the Chicxulub crater impact.

In Search of Lost Time

In my study I have a black-and-white photograph of my grandfather as a

Advances in nuclear chemistry and instrumentation have enabled scientists to

Turner characterized his failed prediction as an “epistemic bet against science.”

Advances in nuclear chemistry revealed new knowledge pathways to unlock the

George Borg is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s

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