Palaeontologists have fired a new salvo in a 30-year-old war of words over the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid that smashed into earth some 65 million years ago.
The hypothesis holds that an asteroid or comet whacked into the modern-day Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, igniting massive fires, triggering a “nuclear winter” that cooled the planet and withered the vegetation on which the dinos depended.
Not so, declare naysayers. Their argument for this is a thick layer of sediment in eastern Montana and western North Dakota which is a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils. A three-metre layer deposited before the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary is devoid of such fossils. This means the dinosaurs must have gradually become ext-inct long before the impact, they suggest. The issue be-came enshrined in palaeontological debate as “the three-metre gap.”
But scientists reporting on Wednesday in Biology Letters say they have found solid evidence to rebut the revisionists. A Yale University team has discovered a 45-cm brow horn from a ceratops dinosaur located just 13 cm below the line where the Cretaceous-Tertiary sediment first begins. They found it in the Hell Creek formation of south-eastern Montana, at a hill known as Camel Butte. “The discove-ry demonstrates that a Cretaceous ‘three-metre gap’ does not exist and is inconsistent with the hypothesis that non-avian dinosaurs were extinct prior to the impact,” the study says.
***
‘Stinky socks fight malaria’
Montreal: The odour of dirty socks can be used to lure mosquitoes into a deadly trap before they can spread malaria, a researc-her said. Dr Fredros Oku-mu, of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, disco-vered that mosquitoes were more attracted to the odour of filthy feet than to humans sleeping in the same area.
“We had a house with a man sleeping inside and a second house with a synthetic mixture. We were getting four times more mosquitoes in the house with the synthetic mixture, which, when doused with insecticide, killed the bugs,” he said. “When mosquitoes are crossing the compound, they sense something that they think is a human being. They attempt to bite that person or that device and get killed.” —AFP