00:00:12weighed over 6 tons and possess the
00:00:16greatest bite force of any known
00:00:17land-based animal then suddenly 65
00:00:21million years ago t-rex and the
00:00:24dinosaurs vanished from the face of the
00:00:27earth for decades their disappearance
00:00:33was a mystery
00:00:37then in 1980 while examining rock strata
00:00:40from 65 million years ago scientists
00:00:44found a thin layer of a material called
00:00:46iridium iridium is normally only found
00:00:50in space so scientists turn to an
00:00:53extraordinary explanation for how the
00:00:56element came to earth it may have come
00:00:59on a gigantic meteor they then figured
00:01:03out that this meteor struck our planet
00:01:06with a force ten billion times more
00:01:08powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb
00:01:11creating a global catastrophe that
00:01:14killed 70% of all species including the
00:01:18dinosaurs the idea was originally met
00:01:23with a chorus of skepticism then in 1990
00:01:28scientists found the 112-mile Chicxulub
00:01:31meteor crater off the coast of Yucatan
00:01:34Mexico it proved a meteor had indeed
00:01:37caused the dinosaur extinction and
00:01:40revolutionized the way scientists
00:01:42thought about the distant past
00:01:45but could immediate impact have given
00:01:48rise to the dinosaurs in the first place
00:01:52it’s a contentious new idea that’s been
00:01:55pioneered by a research chemist named
00:01:57LuAnn Becker of the University of
00:01:59California Santa Barbara
00:02:02just as iridium provided the
00:02:04extraterrestrial fingerprint of the
00:02:06cheek Shalhoub meteor that killed the
00:02:08dinosaurs
00:02:09Becker has found something she believes
00:02:11provides the evidence of the meteor
00:02:14impact that gave rise to them
00:02:20Becker’s story starts here in Sudbury
00:02:23Canada in 1996 Becker and fellow
00:02:29geochemist Robert parada were on the
00:02:32hunt for an extremely rare molecule that
00:02:34they believed could only be created by
00:02:37the incredibly intense conditions of a
00:02:39meteor impact Sudbury was the ideal
00:02:42candidate it had recently been
00:02:44identified as the site were a meteor up
00:02:47to 12 miles across struck the earth
00:02:49nearly 2 billion years ago it would have
00:02:56been a huge high-velocity
00:03:00high-temperature high-pressure impact
00:03:03exploding body
00:03:08clues that Sudbury was an impact site
00:03:11are still etched in the local rocks
00:03:15quite literally and all of these rocks
00:03:17if you take a look around you see these
00:03:19really nice
00:03:20shocked type features look like little
00:03:23pyramids almost little teepees but they
00:03:26they literally are the representation of
00:03:28the the actual shock of the of the
00:03:32impact the asteroid or the comment
00:03:34literally hitting the earth
”