Citation Needed - Chicxulub Impact

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

The Chicxulub crater (IPA: [t͡ʃikʃuˈluɓ] ⓘ cheek-shoo-LOOB) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo.[3] It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when a large meteorite, about ten kilometers (six miles) in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 kilometers (120 miles) in diameter and 20 kilometers (12 miles) in depth. It is the second largest confirmed impact structure on Earth, and the only one whose peak ring is intact and directly accessible for scientific research.[4]

Hello and welcome. Citation needed. Podcasts where you choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet. That's how it works now. I'm Cecil and I'll be making sure we're all on the right orbit tonight and I'm joined by four planetary bodies, Tom, Heath, Eli and Noah. I'm going to go first and I'm going to claim Uranus. Saturn. I got to go first and I'm gonna claim Uranus.

Saturn, I got Saturn. Did you flip a coin? Mercury. When you say planetary, are we counting dwarf planets here? Or? Patrons, you are the life-giving sun in this cold, cold, cold universe. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us Eli, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event we'll be talking about today. We'll be talking about the Chicksaclub Impact, which is apparently pronounced Chickshaloob, as though it was Tony Shalhoub's brother. Or, if you want to go all the way Spanish about it, it's Chicxaloob. I don't think that's not Spanish at all. Noah, what was the Chicxalobe impact? What was that? Yes, the Chicxalobe impact was the catastrophic space bullet that took out the dinosaurs.

66 million years ago, it ushered in the most recent of the so-called Big Five mass extinction events, and though a bit small compared to the Permian Triassic extinction, still managed to wipe out about 80% of every species in existence at the time. Oh sorry, I'm a Permian Triassic guy. And it's by the way like that's 80% of species who the fuck even knows what percent of the total population of the fifth that ultimately managed to survive were also killed. Exactly climate change is not a big deal

That's my point of this essay and that's why Noah wrote it And now all I can picture is a bunch of triceratops rolling coal and wearing MAGA hats. I'm there No more than the impact event itself I want to talk about how we came to understand it because here's the thing as much as I know I'm setting Eli up for old jokes when I say this, or do an essay about dinosaurs, actually, I guess, as recently as my childhood, the idea that an asteroid took out the dinosaurs was still pretty controversial. It was at the very least far from the settled science that it is today. And the story of how it became the dominant theory is a great example of science advancing

human knowledge that many of our listeners actually live through. So yes, we're going to talk about the impact itself eventually, but mostly this will be the story about the glorious science that went into learning that it happened. Yeah, the glorious science. First, it starts out with a Crocoduck. Okay. Okay. So obviously we don't need a crocodile duck chimera for evolution to make sense. But my favorite part of that whole thing, there was a crocodile. Yeah. I read it and read comfort right to use. Why is there no crocodile duck as a gotcha during a debate in 2007, but we knew about

the anata sucus in 2003 and that name literally means duck crocodile. Okay, all right, but its name doesn't mean crocodile duck. So who's really laughing? So obviously the question of what happened to the dinosaurs has been with us since we first figured out that there used to be dinosaurs, right? Because we noticed that they weren't around anymore. And most of the dominant theories back in the day... I'm sure in speech seats we are. Right, yeah, we are, yeah. So, but here's the thing. Most of the dominant theories back in the day were weirdly judgy about shit, right? Like as though the dinosaurs chose to get so big through

their sheer hubris and ultimately they got what they deserve. I did. Right? Like they got so big that they outstripped their potential food sources or they were too big to move around fast enough or whatever. And that's insane when you consider the vast amount of time they spent not extinct despite being the same size the whole time. I want to go to that Jurassic Park with the old, just a bunch of like sloppy old dinosaurs, like a men's league softball game. They got like knee braces. They have to take a time out at second base put ointment on with the knee brace back on What are you talking about Heath? We go to atheist conventions all the time Constant beeping of those little rascal scooters

Just the like days of the week thing with their pills in it They're taking this I can't pick these up with the t-rex can't even reach it. It's like fun. Yeah, right I can't get there. Can you can you I guess I can source readers on? Let me see if I can eat this Come on just don't be a dick He is to start chasing him at like two in the afternoon. So as paleontology advanced, we learned eventually, though, that it wasn't just dinosaurs that died out at around the same time that they were

dying, so was damn near everything else. The fossil records show that there was clearly a worldwide extinction level event somewhere around 66 million years ago. So we came up with all these new theories. One of the most popular was that dinosaurs died out because there was a long period of extreme volcanism that fucked up food sources and otherwise shat all over the environment. And that theory had a lot going for it, most notably the fact that there was a period of extreme volcanism right before the dinosaurs went extinct. And I know what you might be thinking, right? That maybe the volcanism right before the dinosaurs went extinct. And I know what you might be thinking, right?

That maybe the volcanism was touched off by the impact. It turns out that the time doesn't actually line up right. So it looks like the volcanoes were somehow just unrelated. Yeah. I like that we're like adrift in nothingness, but we're on a giant pastry piping bag while we do it. Yes, exactly. You know, the whole volcano thing is weird because you think with all those

Vulcans we'd live long and prosper. Thank you, Tom. I was so confused by that last paragraph. Okay. It's pronounced Volcanoism. Thank you. Oh, okay. Well, thank you.

Now it makes sense. Earlier Heath said chimera too, yeah. Vulcansist, vulcansist. All right, so now there were several theories, like for example, that dinosaurs and damn near everything else died out from diseases that were spread when continents slammed into each other and introduced previously isolated populations. But none of the theories quite match the data and this state of affairs persisted for damn near 200 years.

Nobody could come up with a satisfactory explanation because nothing in known geology could account for such a mass die off in such a short period of time. Exactly. We massively overreacted to COVID is what Noah is saying. And it's why he wrote this essay. No, it is not. And I should emphasize here that the speed of the die off was a big sticking point, right? Because there had been other mass die offs in earth's history, some even bigger than this one, but they took place over much longer periods, or at least they seemed to. It's actually really hard to date extinction events because fossilization is really rare, and finding fossils is rare still. So the last existing specimen of two species that went extinct on the same fucking day might be a million years apart.

And with the sheep's admission that this is at least part of the reason I chose this as my subject this week, that tendency of short extinction events to appear spread out in the fossil record is called the senior lips effect. Okay. No, no, no, someone should just write something here or else we're going to wind up with a Latino flat earth or Botox enthusiast Eli podcast. The Bruce character senior lips. I'm really into Bitcoin and NFL football. Flat Earth or Botox enthusiast Eli podcast of his character. Hola, me llamo Señor Lips.

I'm really into Bitcoin and NFL football. Do you guys wanna talk about the NFL draft or something? If you guys didn't want me to derail the podcast with- Zip line. If you guys didn't want me to derail the podcast with unrelated characters, you should not have said words. This is on you. That's fair.

This is on you. Yep. So okay, but the idea of a quick extinction event really went against pretty much everything that geologists knew. Okay. Admittedly, I don't know shit about fuck, but why are we asking geologists about this at all? Like we're all the biologists and paleontologists on their 15. Well, so it was actually the paleontologists and biologists that were asking the geologists, like, what the fuck could cause this, right?

You guys know the Earth. But the suggestion of a single cataclysmic event was pretty much dismissed out of hand. I know it seems silly in retrospect, but the dominant theory underpinning geology was gradualism. And gradualism said that major changes to the Earth's surface happened over slow periods.

The Colorado River carves out the Grand Canyon. The Himalayas grow two and a half inches a year. Plate tectonics push the continents apart 1.08 times 10 to the negative ninth miles per hour. We talk about the actual thing in the title of the episode. Yeah, got it. Exactly. Thank you.

Geologic pacing. That's the key to a successful podcast. And so here's the thing that you have to understand about gradualism. Before that, the dominant theory in terms of the earth's formation was God did it. But so the recognition of the time scales that it took to make mountains and Grand Canyons is one of the main things that rescued geology from magical thinking and bullshit. So anything that challenged that brought about the kind of wins that we all feel as soon as something challenges, say, the theory of evolution, right? The idea that major changes to the world happen when a

fireball is cast down from the heavens, smacked to the pulpit. So most geologists kind of instinctively avoided this, but not all of them. So this is where we get to the father and son team that first proposed the impact theory. That would be Nobel Prize winning physicist, Louis Walter Alvarez and his geologist son, just regular Walter Alvarez. See, eventually scientists discovered this geological signature of the mass extinction event, this layer of sediment that clearly demarcated the moment where there stopped being dinosaurs. You probably heard this referred to as the KT boundary. Obviously.

Yeah. It's not really used in science anymore. It stood for Cretaceous Tertiary, but paleontologists changed the name of the tertiary period. There's more than two before it, I guess, to the paleogene. So now that's called the KPG boundary, despite the fact that Cretaceous still starts with a C and not a K. They let a German guy do it so you know he's gonna fuck it up. So to settle the question of how long it took for the mass extinction to take place, what you needed to know is how long it took for the KPG boundary to be laid down. Not to be confused with how long it takes to lay down the K-Y boundary, the scientific

measurement of how much lube you need for butt stuff. Right. Yes. Also very important. Always more. You always need more. Right. Right.

See who gets it. So with apologies for the deep, deep nerdery here, the Alvarez's idea of how to tackle this problem was actually very cool. They decided to check the iridium content of that boundary. So iridium is a super heavy element. It's the second heaviest metal after osmium. So when the earth was forming, the iridium all sort of sank down to the core and joined up with the molten iron. But there's still iridium on the earth's surface at any given time because it's contained in asteroids. Right? asteroids crash into the planet they leave their iridium along with all their

other constituents and that gets caught up in the sediment that's eventually going to be unearthed by geologists. Well, since we have a pretty good idea how much iridium the planet picks up from stray meteors and shit every year, the alvarez has figured that they could just check the iridium content of that layer and divide that by the iridium per year that we normally get. And that would tell them how long it took the rock layer to form. So they did that. And the number was insanely high, right, like on the order of millions of years, which couldn't be right because the rock layer was too thin for that. So the only other possibility was that the time when that layer was being laid down had a lot more meatier than normal.

Well, so far we have a leaky pastry bag with a thin layer of iridium frosting. Looks like you have to stick around till after the break for that cherry on top. Oh, Ray, you got a second? Well, if it isn't my good friend Kirk Cameron. How are you, young man? Uh, not, you know what? Not great, Ray. Oh no. You hate to hear it.

What happened? So, you know how on the way to the master tapes we made a joke about how for evolution to be right, you would either have to be something like a like a crocoduck? Oh yeah, like a crocoduck. I remember that. Yeah, well, they found one. Found one what? A crocoduck.

What do you mean they found one? We made it up. No, yeah, well, it exists. It's called the, I wrote it down, annatto suckus. You've gotta be fucking kidding me. Right, right, language. Oh, fuck off Kirk, fuck, fuck.

A fucking crocoduck, the whole thing? Not just like a- He knows the whole thing. It was trapped in a fossil. Of course it was trapped in a fucking fossil. Everything's trapped in a fucking fossil. Isn't it, Cack? They also find his birth certificate.

Maybe an early version of the Bible that says, just kidding, this is all fake at the end. I don't think so. That was a real question, you nuts! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I swear to Christ, God is real and he's on the other fucking side! That's the banana thing and now there's God fucking fucking hell!

You want to make a documentary about how we're still writing it doesn't matter? Yeah, let me grab some b-roll of me bothering teenagers. Hey Ray, what's a nonce? It's you, Kirk, it's you. ["The Bachelorette"] When we left off, God was trying to trick us by partially burying fake dinosaur bones and spreading iridium everywhere like he was whitewashing a fence. What happened next Noah? Yeah, okay.

So based on their iridium measurements, the Alvarez proposed a radical theory in 1980. It was a radical decade. So, shortly afterwards, a Dutch paleontologist named Jan Smit independently proposed the same thing, but he didn't have all the cool iridium data to talk about. So fuck him. He's not in my essay. Anyway, so despite their evidence, the paleontological world didn't warm to the theory right away. Now, part of this is the typical scientific bristling that happens when scientists from two different fields try to rewrite a third field with evidence from a fourth field.

But a lot of it too, was that it's a theory that just screamed pop science. Again, we have the benefit of hindsight, so it seems kind of obvious that it's correct from our viewpoint. But what we're talking about here is the death of the dinosaurs, one of the most popular unanswered questions in all of science, you know, popular with the lay public at that point, that is. And your answer is, hey, maybe the most dramatic thing that ever happened in the history of the fucking planet did it. Right? Look, I feel like the early resistance to the impact theory was pretty justified. Sorry, your proposal is maybe they got blowed up. Right? What are you a troubled child trying to wrap up a game of pretend? Well, it didn't help that every

sentence of the thesis there began with apparently, well, yeah, right. But eventually, evidence piled up, the scientific community came around to the Alvarez's theory. The straw that broke the back of the resistance came when they actually found the impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico. And I'd explain how we found it and how we know it's the right crater, but it involves a bunch of shit about shock quarts that I don't understand. Right? And I, yes, I could loosely paraphrase the description in the Wiki and fake it, but I already made Tom listen to all that iridium shit and I don't want to give him more reasons

to kill me. Okay. See, this is why people thought an episode about screws was real. No illusions. This is why. I'm sorry. Did somebody call my name? I was daydreaming about literally anything else.

Just a moment ago. Okay. All right. All right. So let's talk about... And he used the shock quarts to wake him up. Don't you wake up with a shock quarts thing? I... Okay. Not time. It's not... The time isn't set. It's a type of watch. I'm going to hide your phone. So, okay. Well, let's talk about the theory itself. Finally! So, okay. So what is a meteor?

God damn it! Because... Fuck! Finally. So, okay. So what is a meteor? Because the nomenclature, look, the nomenclature on this one is almost intentionally confusing. So to be clear, a meteoroid is a rock floating around in space. A meteor is a flash of light as a meteoroid burns up entering the atmosphere. A meteorite is a former meteoroid that survived its way to the surface Right now it's on cameo and a Metroid thanks for interrupting is the momentum of the joke bill

That's that do that help think and a Metroid is a highly aggressive creature that feeds off the energy of its prey and as if the Terminology isn't confusing enough the study of meteors is called meteoritics Is some asshole weathermen took meteorology when the meteor people weren't looking apparently? Well, let's not forget that the visual measurement of choosing which pork chop to take off a platter is also meteor Okay, lots of schools of thought on this one. I am a surface area You do an essay about that then Lots of schools of thought on this one. I am a surface area guy. That's what I'm doing. You want more of the flavors. You do an essay about that then.

Now less globular, more spread. I like, you know what I'm saying? I sort of pegged you for a volume, man. No, I don't. I'm not going for volume. I'm not going for just, you know, I think I get the good sense. Hand up the volume.

No, it's not just the size that matters. It's the volume. Now, look, so you might be thinking, hey, why are you talking about meteors? Wasn't it an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? And yes, I mostly included the meteor thing for the Metroid joke that Eli interrupted. But yeah, there's not a clearly delineated difference between the two. But in the same way that there's not a clearly delineated difference between a pebble and a rock or a rock and a boulder. So basically, asteroids are really big space rocks and meteoroids are little fragments

that get chipped off of them or are left behind in the tail of a comet. But the difference is a matter of size generally. Okay. So a meteor is an asteroid that just got out of the pool. Got it. It's a meteoroid. But yes. Now you might be thinking, Hey, what the fuck are we we talking about asteroids wasn't it a comet that killed the dinosaurs?

Fucking God why and the answer on that one is that we don't actually know right comets and asteroids have different compositions But in terms of the shit that they would leave behind over millions of years apparently they're too similar for us to tell The general consensus is that it was most likely an asteroid But I think that's mostly because asteroids just hit the Earth way more often. Also, it's worth clarifying, asteroids is an old-timey video game as well, but a steroid is why Russia's not allowed to play sports. All right. So, while I'm on the meteor diversion anyway, I should probably point out that the very concept of meteors is actually newer than you might think. Right? So in a sense, you can't say

anybody discovered meteors anymore than you can say somebody discovered the moon. But most people didn't connect shooting stars with the occasional odd rocks found in a place where it definitely didn't belong. Right? And yes, sometimes peasants would say, hey, this big rock fell through my roof. But peasants said a lot of shit. And even when scientists were inclined to believe them, they assumed that rock must have come from a volcano, even if there were no volcanoes for hundreds of miles in any direction. Yeah, I mean, it didn't help that before the scientists could get a look.

Most peasants had burned the asteroid for being a witch. Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, they covered it in leeches first, though. I mean, the scientists actually covered it in leeches. Right. Yeah. But but so in 1803, a huge rock broke up in reentry and rained brimstone all the fuck over a big city in Normandy. Over 3000 rocks fell and it happened in the middle of the day with a whole city full of witnesses.

And those witnesses included rich people. Right? So scientists took them way more seriously and they ultimately concluded that, crazy as it sounded, rocks sometimes just fall out of the fucking sky. Now, of course, nobody in 1803 could remotely imagine how big these sons of bitches could get. Yeah, it wasn't until a little known director named Michael Bay made a film called Armageddon that would go on to win our hearts and minds that we truly understood. I was hoping to get through this essay without that coming up. Now, asteroids can of course get really huge.

People's champion Dwayne Johnson came around. Thank you. Big rocks. So, well done. So if they get too big, if asteroids get too big, we reclassify them as dwarf planets. But the biggest asteroid in our solar system, which is, I guess, also a dwarf planet is Ceres, which has a radius of damn near 300 miles or 476 kilometers. The helpful analogy that NASA offers is that if Earth was the size of a nickel, Ceres would be the size of a poppy seed.

Hey, NASA, maybe start saying fucking grape or marble instead of nickel from now on. You got a bunch of Nazis thinking it's flat now. All right, so. All right, so. This is how you get Nazis. Right? So, okay, but this enormous fucker

was actually first discovered, Ceres was actually first discovered in 1802, the year before the fateful French meteor. At the time it was believed to be a planet, right? Cause they didn't even know that asteroids were out there, but it got demoted and you know what? Nobody even cried for it. The counterpoint, Pluto was a tragedy, but in this case,

this was just a series of unfortunate events. So internet does not deserve you. See, so that's fucking brilliant. This is just a series of unfortunate events Now the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs much years way smaller than then series That one was about the size of Mount Everest That is the comparison that every fucking body uses even though I think we would all need some kind of a comparison to get our heads around how big Mount Everest is if it's floating in the fucking sky. How many nickels is it? How many poppy seeds? So it but it was between six and nine miles wide that's 10 to 15 kilometers and its impact would have

released as much energy as 100 tera tons of TNT. Now, if you have trouble getting your head around that and who wouldn't, the Wiki helpfully adds to that is 420 zeta joules. What the fuck are you even saying? You're making these words up, Noah! So, okay, it's about a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs that we dropped on Japan. So I want you to picture yourself back in the late Cretaceous, the very late Cretaceous. Thank you for the effects. Oh yes, back when Noah was just beginning his middle age. I've got it. Oh, I thought you were going to say just when he was beginning this essay, but yeah, no.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, rascal scooters. So the impacts probably happened in late spring or early summer in the Northern Hemisphere. I have no idea how we know that, but there's a big argument about it on the Wikipedia page. So apparently we do. So, you know, it'd be warm, but not too warm. You still need a jacket in the evenings, maybe. A bunch of big ass bugs flying around and ferns probably. A couple of long neck dinosaurs that aren't brontosaurus, because those died out way before

this, are lazily munching on a couple of treetops. Ankylosaurus wanders along the riverside looking for trouble. Tyrannosaurus stalks nearby knowing better than to fuck with that Anky and suddenly there's a bright flash of light in the sky. And as we've seen from literally every drawing depicting this moment in the history of art, the Tyrannosaurus looks up with an oh fuck expression on his face, tries to cover his eyes, but his hands are comically too short to get there. It's like Tom.

Asteroid or a comet? I don't know. It's a matter of matter. Would it would have been a meteor at that point, actually? But but anyways, so the other one there, was there a Noah there to correct all the dinosaurs? He got exploded, at least in this story. He just said there was an angry source. Yeah. Okay.

There. So so okay. So but this undetermined space rock struck what would eventually become Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula with so much force that it left the crater 110 miles in diameter. That's almost 180 kilometers. And that crater persists 66 million years later. There was so many nickel years. Right? So fucking many.

Yeah. So there was an earthquake that might have been global, but it was definitely strong enough to like cause major landslides as far away as Argentina. It also triggered a massive tsunami, as did some of those landslides that the earthquake kicked loose. Yeah. And it all started the oil industry. They have the worst effect that it had. Yes. But worse than the dinosaurs technically did it. Not humans, if you think. Yeah, that it had, yes. But worse than the water. The dinosaurs technically did it, not humans,

if you think about it, to the climate change. Yeah, really, honestly. But worse than the water or the oil was the fire. So when the asteroids struck, these tiny particles of rock were fired into the air with a bunch of other debris, and these particles of rock were small, but there were enough of them to blanket the planet

in a two and a half millimeter thick layer of them. How many nickels is that for reference? I don't know. I didn't look that up. It's like about one. Thank you, Heath. I need someone to help me here at The Metric. All right. Go on. So they carried an insane amount of kinetic force. As nickels do.

According to the University of Colorado geologist Doug Robertson, as quoted in a Smithsonian article about this shit, quote, Colorado geologist Doug Robertson asked, quote, in a Smithsonian article about this shit, quote, the kinetic energy carried by these spherules, the aforementioned tiny particles, is colossal, about 20 million megatons total, or about the energy of a one-megaton hydrogen bomb at six kilometer intervals around the planet. Continuing the quote, all the energy had to go somewhere. So it was converted to heat and sent back to the planet from 40 miles above. End quote. So about 40 minutes after the impact, it started to rain fire all over the world. And it kept doing that for hours. All the school age dinosaurs were super happy.

They had a fire day off from school, followed by a millennium snow day. Yeah, right, right. Religious nutbag dinosaurs feeling so smug, just like, I know today, Pterodactyl Jesus is real. And that same T-Rex from before now trying to hold an umbrella over his head, but it doesn't reach. He's like, fuck, I deserve to go extinct. Just fuck. umbrella over his head, but it doesn't reach. Like, look, I deserve to go. She's

just so. So any animal that was an underground or underwater would have been burned up in this global firestorm. Wildfires would have started pretty much everywhere that was flammable. But even when there was nothing to burn up, the air temperature would have been hot enough to cook your ass alive just from all the extra heat that these tiny particles were adding to the environment. Yeah, which is why only the stop dropping Rolesaurus wrecks.

So I appreciate you at least trying. Even just that would have been enough to leave an imprint in the geological record. But of course it got way worse. As we all know, the worst of the extinction came not from the initial impact, but from the lingering effects afterwards. The debris thrown into the atmosphere by the asteroid didn't come raining back down all at once, after all. A lot of it stayed in the atmosphere for years, blocking out a huge amount of the sunlight.

When you add to that the soot from the worldwide fucking forest fires and shit, you've got a blanket of debris so thick that for about a year No sunlight would have reached the surface at all. It still hasn't reached England So at this point aquatic life which had it way easier than the initial impact than the shit on land Joined in on the mass extinction because the base of the marine ecosystems food chain is phytoplankton, right, which create energy through photosynthesis. No sunlight, no photosynthesis, no phytoplankton, which means no food for a fuck ton of animals, which means no food for a fuck ton of their predators. That same thing is of course happening on land, just with way fewer life forms left to die

off. I just hope they eat the billionaire dinosaurs first. Okay, but not George. Soros. Oh, shit. He's one of the good ones. Well done. Well done. So forget it. It's hard to say for sure exactly how much stuff died off and how long it took. But we do know a lot and a lot of the ways that we know it are really fucking cool. Like I just wanted to include this. Like for example, you can't figure out insect extinctions from the fossil record really, because there's not enough of them, right? We know from Jurassic Park that insects do get trapped in amber now and again, and there's like imprints that are left in stone sometimes here and there. But there's nowhere near enough for us to make a reasonable estimate in terms of total

losses. But very clever scientists figured out that you could use leaf damage as a proxy for insect activity and based on the variety of insect damage on fossilized leaves before and after the impact, we can say with relative certainty that the insect variety still hadn't fully recovered from the event 1.7 million years later. I get it. I'm still mad about tweets from 2015. Yeah, right. Exactly. So suffice to say, between 75 and 80 percent of all life forms died out in a matter of a couple years.

And keep in mind, it would have been way more than 75 to 80 percent of all life that was alive at the time dying off. 75 to 80 percent, that's how much died off to such massive degrees that their entire species went extinct afterwards. But of course, it didn't affect every species equally, right? Species that lived on the sea floor, animals that burrowed or lived in caves, and most importantly, animals that ate dead shit did much better, right? The only way to survive for years on a planet where the main food sources aren't being replenished is to eat carrion. Pretty sure that's Twitter's actual business plan.

Right? Yeah. So yeah, so we lost a lot of species, including all the non-avian dinosaurs. See, I said non-avian at some point, dinosaur nerds. Now you can't write me emails. But on the bright side, without the Chicxulub impact and the resulting mass die off, we never would have had Cornish pasties.

All right. If you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? If you Google Chicxulub impact, a little asteroid flies across the screen and then the whole screen shakes a little bit. And that alone made this topic worth research. It's pretty awesome. I did that too. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty great. Are you ready for the quiz? Eli's going to do it right now. Absolutely. I'm doing it right now. As soon as Eli's done Goog. Are you ready for the question? Eli's gonna do it right now. Absolutely.

I'm doing it right now. As soon as Eli's done Googling Chick Shalubim. Eli, did you do it yet? I did. Wow. Right? Classic. It was a little more realistic than I wanted.

Okay. It's too soon. It's a little too soon. Yeah, I get it. Right? Yeah. All right, Noah. It doesn't happen when you do 9-11.

I just checked. Oh my God. What? Maybe, when will it when will it 66? Alright, Noah, which is the following is the best dinosaur extinction porn why a deep impact Yeah, deep impacted bowel something like that be the sperm in Triassic extinction event. I'm a big fan of that one earlier you said permeate mine Triceratops So good cretaceous D

All right, well Heath I was questioning my choice of subject this week until you said triceratops So I so good tricerat said triceratops. So it has to be triceratops. Triceratops, well done. Angelo, if you draw that shirt, we'll sell 800,000 of them. You know what you need to draw. We don't need to talk about it. Draw it, we'll put it up.

All right, Noah, the dinosaurs died off from the various effects of the meteoric asteroid comet impact, whatever it was, but also mostly because they were stupid. What could they have done to survive? A. Hide under a desk when they saw the flash. Duck and guffrey. B. Get in a refrigerator.

That's also helpful. C. Stockpile buckets of dehydrated slop. Yeah, I've heard good things. Or D. Get right with their dino god. Oh, it has to be E, all of the above. It would've worked. I mean, just pick one, guys. Pick one.

Any of the above, yes. That's what I meant to say. All right, Noah. Obviously, the most important question people have about this episode is who will Senior Lips be in the podcast? So is Senior Lips, A, a mean mean nickname friends gave senior pets after he got a cosmetic lip plump? B the Mick Jagger of the senior verse or C an expression for when you're about to see

the eclipse but senior pets flies in his personal helicopter in front of you and Michelle Blockman blocking your view and so you miss it alright So the correct answer is that? Unfortunately is secret answer D something too weird for me to even imagine That is no it isn't yeah, you're wrong. It's C. Oh All right, well you I won Eli won somehow. Alright. Hey! Hey! It's like, isn't that like the

birthday of someone you hate at work? Wow. Just call me out in front everybody. I want a Tom essay. Okay. Well, Tom essay it is. Alright. Well, for Noah Heath, Tom and Eli, I'm Cecil, thanking you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week and by then Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can listen to all our other shows which we mention frequently. So go listen to where we mention them. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod, or you could leave us a five star review everywhere you can. If you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.