The “Dinosaur Asteroid”

It is rare for a scientific postulation to gain public traction. It is even rarer for one to become etched into public consciousness in the same way that “the asteroid” that purportedly wiped out the dinosaurs has. Recently a new paper from Nature Communications has postulated that the asteroid hit at exactly the right angle to be as deadly as possible. This paper has prompted me to examine the whole idea of an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs.

The asteroid wiping out dinosaurs may be the most popular theory of dinosaur extinction but it is far from the only one. A multiplicity of theories exist on the topic,  from volcanic eruptions to climatic changes, to male or female dominance, to starvation, to even that they gassed themselves to death with their own flatulence. However, the asteroid theory is the one that most of the public accepts and most of the scientific community promotes.

We have discussed the asteroid before when we talked about the crater under the Yucatan peninsula. However, we need to expand on that discussion because there are other things in play besides the crater.  For example, we need to ask the question: what did the meteor do?

According to the most recent paper, when the asteroid hit the earth, it hit at a very steep angle, roughly sixty degrees of a possible ninety. This impact angle would throw massive amounts of debris into the atmosphere, which would drastically lower temperatures globe wide.  This would have resulted in a massive plant die-off, due to lack of sunlight, as well a die-off among cold-blooded animals, particularly large ones like dinosaurs. Cold-blooded dinosaurs would have been vulnerable to colder environments as they relied on the sun to warm themselves.  According to the evolutionists, this dependency would have caused the dinosaurs to become extinct, alongside about seventy-five percent of life on earth.

There are, as always, problems with this view. First and foremost, the angle of asteroid impact was derived from a computer simulation, not empirical science. They did not measure the impact angle from the crater under the Yucatan peninsula. It was merely modeled based on its purported results. Unfortunately, this modeling, while interesting, is not as valuable as empirical research.

There are some serious other problems with the asteroid hypothesis. Chief among them is how selective it was. For example, dinosaurs, even the smallest ones, were wiped out, but large crocodiles survived, as did huge snakes like anacondas. Both of those organisms rely on sunlight to warm themselves. Why did they survive the asteroid strike when smaller dinosaurs did not? The same could be asked about other larger reptiles like pythons and iguanas. If the evolutionists counter that both crocodiles and anacondas are water-bound and thus could survive easily, then we must also ask why plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and ichthyosaurs went extinct and crocodiles survived?

Another problem is the problem of plants. Plants have an absolute need for sunlight in order to survive. They are tied to it. If the asteroid put as much dust and dirt into the atmosphere as these evolutionists claim, then why did only some plants go extinct? Horsetails and bryophytes suffered heavily, with many species going extinct. Why did angiosperms not go extinct? What about gymnosperms? How did they survive? Essentially the question boils down to this: why was the asteroid selective about what it caused to go extinct?

There are numerous other concerns related to the asteroid, which explains why so many within the scientific community have proposed alternative views. However, the real issue is, there was an extinction. We know this from the fossil record that, at a certain time in history, things that were living, stopped being fossilized. We presume that means they went extinct. This assumption is not necessarily true, given that we know of dozens of examples of living fossils; animals who disappear from the record at a certain time period, yet are found alive in the present. However, it does seem likely that some kind of extinction event happened. The question is: does the asteroid provide the best explanation for it?

Even were the asteroid strike to have occurred, it would not account for the fossilization we observe. Fossilization requires rapid burial. An asteroid strike might provide the correct conditions for extinction, but it does not provide the correct conditions for rapid burial. That requires sediment flows, lots of them, to bury organisms either immediately after death or alive.  The asteroid does not accomplish this…but a flood of Biblical proportions does.

A Biblical Flood would have generated massive sediment flows, rapidly burying organisms and essentially drowning or suffocating them. This rapid burial would allow us to find the massive number of fossils we observe in the present, as well as account for the massive extinctions that occurred among many taxa. Turns out, the Bible had the answer all along.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200526111320.htm

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