An article entitled “Maybe an Asteroid Didn’t Kill the Dinosaurs” by Jeffrey Kluger caught my attention the other day:
  
     “When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar school, you know it has long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That’s the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago – as we’ve all come to know – an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals…Now, however, a study in the Journal of the Geological Society throws all that into question…The fossil record shows that a riot of species was thriving; above it, 65% of them went suddenly missing… they sampled 30 feet higher – and 300,000 years later – that they saw the die-offs.  ‘The mass extinction level can be seen above this interval,’ Keller says. ‘Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub [the name of the meteor] impact.’  Keller’s and Addate’s species samplings are not, of course, conclusive…But since the new digs were so close to ground zero, the immediate species loss ought to be have been – if anything – greater there than anywhere else in the world.  Instead, the animals seemed to escape unharmed.”