NATURAL SELECTION IS JUST SO YESTERDAY

Huge meteor strike that 'gave birth to the dinosaur' (Lewis Smith, The Sunday Times, June 4th, 2006)

Sixty-five million years ago a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. Now new evidence suggests an even bigger chunk of rock hurtled from space into the Earth to give birth to them.

Scientists have located a massive crater under the Antarctic ice that they believe gave rise to the evolution of dinosaurs.

The 300-mile (480km) wide crater is thought to have been created by a meteor almost as big as London. It dates back 250 million years to the time of the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history and the event that led to the first dinosaurs evolving.

Such was the catastrophic nature of the extinction that up to 96 per cent of all marine creatures were killed and 70 per cent of land animals. The strike may also have been powerful enough to have begun the break-up of the Gondwana supercontinent, which resulted in Australia sheering off and drifting northwards. [...]

“This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time,” Ralph von Frese, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, said.

“All the environmental changes that would have resulted from the impact would have created a highly caustic environment that was really hard to endure. So it makes sense that a lot of life went extinct at that time.”

While killing off about nine in every ten species of animal, including trilobites, the mass extinction paved the way for new types of animals to evolve.Among the main beneficiaries were archosaurs, the immediate ancestors of dinosaurs, which came quickly to dominate the empty lands. Their descendants still survive in the form of crocodiles and alligators. Within 20 million years of the mass extinction, the first primitive dinosaurs had evolved, including lagosuchus.

Darwinism used to have the patient, measured tone of a Victorian serial novel, but today’s evolutionary biologists may be watching too many Tom Cruise movies.