The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy

by Charles Officer and Jake Page

In 1980 Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez announced his theory that the dinosaurs met their final demise when a meteorite crashed into Earth. Instantly embraced by the media, this theory became the hottest scientific fact. However, many in the scientific community did not support Alvarez's theory. This book chronicles the fantastic story of how this hypothesis became so widespread, reveals the myriad scientific research that proves it wrong, and offers...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020148384X
• ISBN13: 9780201483840
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent, Thought Provoking Book!

An excellent, well reasoned book with plenty of data to support the volcanic-theory of the KT extinctions. A good example of how a reasoned apporoach to a popular scientific theory is important to read.

The book is an excellent study of how a lie becomes fact.

This is a book debunking, sucessfully in my opinion, the popularly accepted idea that a asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago. The asteroid impact theory actually consists of two parts,one that a comet hit the earth 65 million years ago and the other that this caused a mass extinction of life on earth. Most professionals knew the second part was nonsense from the get-go, the mass extinction took place over a two million year long period and could not have been caused by an asteroid strike. However there was always the coincidence of the timing of the impact. Officer and Page summarized data that points out that there is no evidence for an impact that cannot be better explained by other sources or indicates that evidence is being contorted (to say the least), i.e. volcanism is shown to have been the source of the iridium layer, the Chicxulub crater the wrong age, etc. The authors may have written a more important book than they intended, in debunking a popular psuedo-scientific theory (there is simply no non-debatable evidence of an impact) they show how nonsense is turned into fact by repetition and politics. Note; the book is written for laymen and not professionals. Then again professionals do not need it.