Deviating slightly from today's political climate and the "Rudd vs the world" debacle over health reform, I'd like to point out this rather strange article in today's web edition of The Australian: "Dinosaurs killed off by Mexican asteroid, not Indian volcano".You can read it here, but I find that my version (below) is a little closer to the mark:
Scientists confident in own theory
A group of 41 scientists confident that a huge asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs have released a report saying that they are right.
The report entitled "Dinosaurs did too die because of an asteroid impact...times infinity" was released to fight off criticism by scientists who believed that a volcano explosion in India was to blame for the demise of the prehistoric beasts.
The criticism came after "some researchers" found that debris discovered at the Chicxulub impact site in Mexico was some 300,000 years too old to have been responsible.
The new report states that debris further from the crater is (coincidentally) just the right age to have started the extinction process. It also claims that a wimpy volcano could not have had that strong an impact on earth.
Following the release of the report, its author Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London said that the asteroid theorists now had "great confidence" in their own belief. Before the report was filed, their confidence in their own theory was only moderately great, she added.
Another member of the report team suggested that a good way of determining the sequence of events that led to dinosaur extinction would be to look further away from the impact site. The debris closer to the site, he said, made their extinction theory too easy to disprove.
P.S.
For the record, I'm more inclined to believe that an asteroid, rather than a volcano, killed the dinosaurs, but before I commit to that theory I'd like some indisputable evidence, not "based on our biased beliefs we are confident that we are right"...bah humbug!
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