Information circulated on the cambridge-conference network is for scholarly use only. The attached text may not be reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. Just when you finally thought you knew what wiped out the dinosaurs, three scientists have a new explanation that offers a whole new twist.
Dinosaurs rank at the top of billions of species that thrived and then vanished forever.
The mass extinction has perplexed scientists ever since they began digging up fossils of creatures no longer on Earth. David M. Raup, a statistical paleontologist at the University of Chicago, estimates that between 5 billion and 50 billion species existed at one time or another on this planet, compared to about 40 million today. The latest, and one of the most intriguing, forays into the debate comes from three scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology. Astrophysicists Arnon Dar, Ari Laor and Nir Shaviv speculate that radiation from the collision of distant stars caused some mass extinctions. Mutants on Earth At the same time, they argue in a report published in the June 29 issue of Physical Review Letters, the radiation would cause mutations, leading to the emergence of entirely new species on Earth.