Dinosaur fedi,I've heard the expression about dinosaurs looking up and seeing the meteor, but is it true? Could any dinosaurs actually look up and see it?#Dinosaurs
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Dinosaur fedi,
I've heard the expression about dinosaurs looking up and seeing the meteor, but is it true? Could any dinosaurs actually look up and see it?
#Dinosaurs -
eruonna 🏳️⚧️replied to [email protected] last edited by
@183231bcb Quoting from the appendix to Riley Black's _The Last Days of the Dinosaurs_ (pp 231-232 in the paperback edition I have):
All the same, we know that the asteroid was moving incredibly fast. It's a sobering point to remember, especially given how popular depictions of the asteroid impact often display the likes of _Tyrannosaurus_ and _Triceratops_ watching a terrible streak rip its way across the sky. This probably didn't happen. The inhabitants of the Late Cretaceous world wouldn't have seen much at all in the skies prior to impact. The event happened so fast that there wouldn't have been that telltale shooting star tail passing overhead.
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[email protected]replied to eruonna 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] Thanks!
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@eruonna Seconded. Interplanetary speeds are on the order of at least several km/s (relative to the Earth), and quite possibly tens of km/s for something like a head-on collision in orbit (unlikely). At those speeds, you're looking at *at most* a few seconds to pass through the appreciable atmosphere.
Even a gracing impact would be a rock passing through any reasonable field of vision much too fast to really register; let alone seeing what it was.