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A review by kevin_shepherd
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Álvarez
4.0
“…Noah’s Ark, in Ken Ham’s understanding of the world, was crammed stem to stern with dinosaurs.” -Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, Oct 2014
For the religiously inclined, magical events (allegedly) occur that could never happen in the natural world. In order to accept these events as legitimate one must suspend disbelief—an action commonly termed as “faith.” In science, one does exactly the opposite—the evidence is scrutinized, the data is analyzed, flaws are ferreted out, tests are designed and administered, and then, if there is anything left standing, the results are submitted for peer review.
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, aside from having one of the greatest titles in the history of scientific literature, is essentially a diagram of how real science is done. It is an anatomy of geological and paleontological discovery; of how and why the Cretaceous period ended so abruptly, taking with it T. Rex and the vast majority of her contemporaries.
NOTE: Published in 1997, Dr Alvarez frequently makes reference to the “Tertiary” period. Tertiary is now an obsolete term largely because of its historical association with scriptural geologists and young-earth creationism. The time span previously defined as Tertiary is now divided into two separate epochs: the Paleocene and the Eocene. The mass extinction event Dr Alvarez references as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) extinction is now commonly referred to as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction or the K-Pg event.
For the religiously inclined, magical events (allegedly) occur that could never happen in the natural world. In order to accept these events as legitimate one must suspend disbelief—an action commonly termed as “faith.” In science, one does exactly the opposite—the evidence is scrutinized, the data is analyzed, flaws are ferreted out, tests are designed and administered, and then, if there is anything left standing, the results are submitted for peer review.
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, aside from having one of the greatest titles in the history of scientific literature, is essentially a diagram of how real science is done. It is an anatomy of geological and paleontological discovery; of how and why the Cretaceous period ended so abruptly, taking with it T. Rex and the vast majority of her contemporaries.
NOTE: Published in 1997, Dr Alvarez frequently makes reference to the “Tertiary” period. Tertiary is now an obsolete term largely because of its historical association with scriptural geologists and young-earth creationism. The time span previously defined as Tertiary is now divided into two separate epochs: the Paleocene and the Eocene. The mass extinction event Dr Alvarez references as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) extinction is now commonly referred to as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction or the K-Pg event.