The Great Pummeling

[Dienekes]

I was watching an old National Geographic documentary recently, where a scientist who had studied species extinctions found that these occurred with regularity every few million years. According to him, this might be due to the -undetected so far- Sun's companion star which comes close to the Sun's Oort cloud periodically, sending a bunch of comets towards the sun, some of which hit the earth.

Anyway, the following article documents one extinction event older than the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Let's hope we manage to get off the planet before another big rock comes our way

New geological findings support a theory that life on earth was nearly destroyed by a meteoroid 185 million years before dinosaurs died out

Nov. 21 — Deep in the layers of the Earth, ancient rock shows signs of a planet, 250 million years ago, teeming with plants, fish, reptiles and proto-mammals . Then, evidence of life around the globe all but vanishes.

Full article:

www.msnbc.com/news/996676.asp?cp1=1

[alex221166]

Before being in Vet school, I got in the Lisbon's University of Sciences, in the Geology major. I was there only for six months, but I remember a Biology class which showed quite clearly how there had been not one, but at least 9 or 10 major holocausts - several of them much much larger than the one that killed off the dinossaurs.

One thing I also remember, is that the meteor crashes that caused those holocausts repeated themselves ~ every 60-70 million years.

That means that a "Deep Impact" type of situation might not be so far fectched as one could think...