So buckle up because this is a strange one. People are now learning what astrophysicists and (possibly) astronauts have known for a very long time:
There are probably very small pieces of dinosaur sitting up there on the Moon. This information has been made public thanks to a (glorious) piece of science writing that has been shared online over the past few days.
Dinosaurs really came first; you read it correctly. Dinosaurs arrived at our satellite 65 million years before humans did, although to be fair, their safety procedures weren’t quite as stringent as ours, so they didn’t so much set foot on the Moon as spray themselves across it like water from a Super Soaker.
How did they get there—and maybe further? You guessed it—their rocket ship (the impressive, terrifying idiots) was catching a ride on the asteroid-related debris that destroyed them.
“there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon” https://t.co/oJlhFKoUeN
— Klaus Stein (@Lapizistik) January 17, 2021
Most of the time, when bodies from space impact planets like ours, all that is left is a crater for people to marvel at.
The impact can, however, cause debris to reach escape velocity (11.2 kilometers per second) and completely leave our atmosphere if the body is big enough and moves quickly enough. While much of it will re-impact on the planet, some fragments may be ejected from its gravitational field and travel outside of the Solar System, where they may collide with other planets.
This is a picture of an asteroid crater in Arizona – Look how close it came to hitting the visitors centre! pic.twitter.com/wNDmWfrzFx
— Mr Gee (@ComedyGee) March 12, 2020
At least 289 meteorites that traveled from impacts on Mars all the way to Earth have been found on our planet thus far, providing ample evidence of this occurrence. It is believed that many moons in the Solar System, including our own, were formed by enormous collisions. According to recent research, it may even be possible for microorganisms to survive the journey from Earth to other planets or vice versa while concealed in rock.
But let’s go back to the dinos. The meteor that struck Earth was moving at such a tremendous speed that, as author Peter Brannen explains in his book The Ends of the World, “In the area of the sky above the earth where there should have been air, the asteroid’s impact left a hole in the atmosphere that was filled with space vacuum. Huge amounts of earth were ejected into orbit and beyond as the heavens rushed in to seal this hole, all within a second or two of impact.”
Dinosaur bones vanished along with the earth and rock. Little fragments of them were buried on the Moon and likely also on Mars at the end of their world.
