How were scientists able to come to the (pretty much universally accepted) conclusion that it was a meteor that killed the dinosaurs when no one was around to witness it?

Question

Is it even remotely possible it was something else that happened around the same time?

In: 0

Answer 1

How are you able to come to the conclusion that dinosaurs existed? You find fossils of those, in specific layers of rocks.

How are you able to say that the middle ages existed? You find books dating from the period, skeletons, swords, armors, giant castles, churches, stuff, all of that leading us to believe there was something.

How are you able to say the American Revolution happened? I mean, you weren’t there.

So how about an entire extinction, which started about 65 Mya?

The answer is simple : facts. Medieval castles weren’t built yesterday, and even you can find fossils yourself to prove the existence of animals that lived millions of years ago. And the fact that you find weird stuff all around the world at this period of time in the soil, with the inability to find fossils of most species after the event leads us towards an obvious extinction event that happened for several millions of years.

What a coincidence, we see intense volcanism, and a giant crater, both happened at a period of time where animals started to get wiped out. How do you think we know of other extinctions? That one wasn’t the most devastating and wasn’t even the hardest to admit. People tend to forget that life on Earth has always been a series of extinctions.

This is why scientists from all around the world agreed with the same conclusions : Because facts are facts, you can’t pretend it’s something else or never happened when the facts say otherwise (unless you’re part of flat earth or similar networks, where sudddenly the more bullshit you say, the more followers you get). It’s not like you can just say whatever fits your vision of the world. What only matters now is getting more and more accurate in our statements.