In 1980, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues proposed that the dinosaurs had been exterminated by an asteroid that smashed into the Earth. I was fourteen at the time, and that mix of dinosaurs, asteroids, and apocalyptic explosions was impossible to resist. I can still see the pictures that appeared in magazines and books–paintings of crooked rocks crashing into Earth, sometimes seen from the heavens, sometimes from the point of view of an about-to-become-extinct dinosaur. Suddenly the history of life was more cinematic than any science fiction movie.
By luck rather than foresight, I eventually became a science writer. I had the good fortune to start the job in the early 1990s, as the impact story was still unfolding. Until then, I knew Walter Alvarez only as a name on a page. Now I could call Alvarez and talk to him about new evidence other scientists were finding to support his impact hypothesis–evidence showing not only that the impact did come at the end of the Cretaceous period, but even revealing where it hit: a site called Chixculub, along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. “It ties everything together,” Alvarez told me with delight in 1991. I had the wonderful privilege of watching the story continue to develop–as a bull’s-eye ring a hundred miles across came to light under the Gulf of Mexico, as a piece of the asteroid itself was fished from the Pacific.
By 1997, the story had matured enough that Alvarez himself was ready to offer a firsthand account in T. rex and the Crater of Doom. It is an intimately readable look at how great science gets done. Scientists notice odd things that seem out of place, they contemplate ludicrous hypotheses, and then they doggedly test those hypotheses for years. T. rex and the Crater of Doom illustrates an important rule about science: some of the most revealing discoveries come not from deep within a single discipline, but at the borders between disciplines. The impact hypothesis would probably have come to nothing if not for the combined efforts of experts on everything from geochronology to pollen fossils to nuclear explosions.
That’s the beginning of my foreword to Princeton University Library’s new edition of Alvarez’s book. I’ve posted the entire introduction here.
Originally published June 26, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.