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Chicxulub’s small sibling

Featuring image: 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite impact ended the age of the dinosaurs. Artist impression of the impact. Painting by Donald E. Davis, Public Domain (C0)

Paper: The Nadir Crater offshore West Africa: A candidate Cretaceous-Paleogene impact structure

Authors: U. Nicholson, V. J. Bray, S. P. S. Gulick, B. Aduomahor

The appearance of a flaming, 10 km wide meteorite over the Gulf of Mexico must have been striking, literally. But could the meteorite, which killed the dinosaurs, have had a small sibling or even a whole family of smaller space rocks hurtling towards Earth?

The massive meteorite impact at Chicxulub in the Gulf of Mexico ended the era of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Now, only a few thousand km apart from it, researchers might have found another, smaller crater of a similar age. And it might show that the Chicxulub meteorite was not alone but part of a cluster of meteorites, bombarding the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period.

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The early evolution of the bird-hipped dinosaurs

Featured image: Landscape mountain sky by Enrique Lopez Garre, Pixabay License.

Paper: A paraphyletic ‘Silesauridae’ as an alternative hypothesis for the initial radiation of ornithischian dinosaurs

Authors: Rodrigo Muller and Maurício Garcia

Dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems for nearly 170 million years in the Mesozoic. There were three major groups of dinosaurs. The long-necked sauropodomorphs, which included the largest animals ever to live on land, could grow as long as a Boeing 737 aircraft. The meat-eating theropods, which included the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, have evolved into the modern dinosaurs: birds. And the bird-hipped ornithischians, an assorted group of herbivorous dinosaurs, evolved some of the most bizarre anatomy known in evolutionary history. This ranged from the plate-backed Stegosaurus, to the thumb-spiked Iguanodon, and from the exaggerated crests of Triceratops to the walking coffee table that is Ankylosaurus.

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