1 Oct 2026 #Dinosaurs #DinosaurExtinction #GertaKeller
What really killed the dinosaurs? The Chicxulub asteroid impact is only half the story. Paleontologist Dr. Gerta Keller spent 35 years arguing that the Deccan Traps volcanoes drove the mass extinction and not the asteroid.
In 1988, Keller walked up to a podium at one of the world’s biggest conferences on mass extinctions, and the room turned on her. Her claim was that the asteroid theory, the story in every textbook, museum, and kids’ dinosaur book, left out something slower, messier, and in some ways more disturbing: hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic eruptions in India that were already poisoning the planet.
This is the story of the Dinosaur Wars, one of the nastiest feuds in science. It covers a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who called paleontologists “stamp collectors,” the scientists whose careers paid the price for disagreeing, and a woman who calls herself “the most hated woman in the world” and still refuses to back down at 81. It also covers the 2023 study in Science that used a computer model to test whether or not volcanic eruptions or an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
I traveled to Princeton to interview Gerta Keller, and spoke with Dartmouth geologist Brenhin Keller (no relation), co-author of the 2023 study, about what the rocks actually say. The answer might change how you think about extinction, including the one happening right now.
In this video:
-The Alvarez asteroid hypothesis and the iridium layer
-How the Chicxulub crater was discovered
-Gerta Keller’s foram evidence and the fight to be heard
-The Deccan Traps: eruptions on a scale Earth rarely sees
-What the 2023 computer model found, and what it didn’t
-Why the way the dinosaurs died matters for climate change today
CHAPTERS
00:00 The Dinosaur Wars
01:12 The most hated woman in science
02:07 Act I: The story everyone knows
06:29 Act II: The problem with Alvarez
11:50 Act III: The woman who wouldn’t shut up
18:42 Act IV: The evidence
27:00 Act V: The computer that settled nothing and everything
34:31 Act VI: What this is really about
39:35 What this means for us
Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 100 people to join Planet Wild using the code TODAYILEARNED10 will get the first month paid for by me: https://planetwild.com/r/todayilearne…
If you want to get to know them better first, check out their plastic mission in Mumbai: https://planetwild.com/r/todayilearne…
KEY SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-…
CONNECT WITH TODAY I LEARNED SCIENCE
Website: https://todayilearned.com
TikTok: / tilscience
Instagram: / tilscience
Substack: https://tilscience.substack.com/
[…]
