June 2001

Chaos killed the dinosaurs
Posted: Thursday, June 28, 2001

(Nature) A bizarre wobble 65 million years ago, perturbing the orbits of Mars, Earth and Mercury, may have caused the demise of the dinosaurs, new models of the Solar System suggest.

The celestial upset could have disrupted the trajectories of asteroids - normally safely confined to asteroid belts -sending one or more careering into the Earth. The proposed wobble coincides with the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, when an asteroid or comet is thought to have smashed into Earth, exterminating the dinosaurs.

"The ultimate cause of the K-T impact - and the demise of the dinosaurs - may have been a chaos-induced change in Solar System dynamics," astrobiologist Bruce Runnegar of the University of California in Los Angeles told the Earth Systems Processes Global Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, yesterday. [More]

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