Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean environment and life
chemistryworld.com
chemistryworld.com
Some other instances I've come across:
* The K-Pg extinction event that wiped off dinosaurs had the impact it did because the asteroid happened to impact a shallow water region. This kicked up a lot of sulfur (in gypsum) that further affected global climate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Effects
* Earth likely had rings ~466M years ago. We deduced this by looking at impact craters from that time period, and seeing that they all lie near the equator (accounting for continental drift): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...
* Earth's rotation period was probably frozen at 21h, ~600M years ago, likely due to interaction between lunar and solar tides. This resonance could have been broken by ice ages (!!!). Amazing to think that global climate affects earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Resonant_st...
Me too! My book is filled with them. Like how minerals in lava, affected by Earth's magnetic field, lock into place while cooling, which provides us with yet another cross-check for radiometric dating. See page 23:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosau...
Science communication should do better and clear up this misunderstanding.
It would be so much cooler to say that the asteroid killed the pterosaurs. Not only is it factually correct, it also opens doors to more curiosity. Why do they say pterosaurs instead of dinosaurs? Turns out they are separate clades. The pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs are all extinct as best as we can tell. The dinosaurs are not.
What is the complete set and which are extinct?
That's as good a complete tree as you're likely to get, down to the class level. Some species in the class Aves survived, and progenitor species with Aves are still around today. There's no significant evidence of species in other classes of the clade Dinosauria surviving much past the impact boundary.
You can push this up one level to the clade Avemetatarsalia (including Pterosaurs along with Dinosaurs) and the statement above would still be true; but pushing it further to Archosauria would not be valid, because crocodilians survived (and survive) as well.
The article makes no mention of other clades that lived during the Cretaceous, such as the pterosaurs, or indeed the mammals. Just as birds are descendants of the few surviving dinosaurs, we are descendants of the few surviving mammals.