Although Neil Armstrong was the first human to step foot on the moon in 1967, dinosaurs may have beat him to it 66 million years prior – or at least pieces of the prehistoric creatures did.
The claim stems from Peter Brannen’s 2017 book, ‘The End of the World,’ which was recently shard on Twitter by blogger Matt Austin.
An excerpt describes the violent asteroid as it ripped a ‘hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere.’
This sent debris flying into to orbit and ‘bits of dinosaurs’ may have been mixed up in the enormous volume of earth that expelled into space – all of which settled on the moon.
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The catastrophic asteroid crashed into what experts say was at the ‘deadliest possible angle’ when it came barreling into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Brannen, who is an award-winning science journalist, writes that the asteroid was larger than Mount Everest and came crashing through the atmosphere 20 times faster than a speeding bullet.
‘This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds,’ the book reads.
The book includes comments from geophysicist Mario Rebolledo at the Centro de Investigación who told Brannen: ‘The pressure of the atmosphere front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there.’
‘Then, when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.’
The book says the scene witnessed 66 million years ago was nowhere near what we see in Hollywood films that usually show a brilliant ball of fire streaking across the sky.
‘As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere,’ Brannen explains.
‘As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.’
‘So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone on the moon,’ Brannen asks.
And Rebolledo replies: ‘Yea, probably.’
Although there is no evidence to support claims in ‘The End of the World,’ scientists have been able to piece together the events that unfolded.
The asteroid left a 120-mile-wide crater at the disaster zone, vaporizing rock and sending billions of tons of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the prehistoric skies.
All living things within hundreds of miles of the impact site would have been incinerated within minutes.
Meanwhile, the dust cloud generated by the impact would have blocked out the sun — likely triggering a ‘nuclear winter’ and seeing temperatures plunge, acid rain falling from the skies and 75 percent of living species wiped out.
‘It would have felt like the ground beneath your feet had become a ship in the middle of the ocean,’ said earth and space science professor Mark Richards at the University of Washington.
‘Then rocks would have bombarded you from a boiling sky that was beginning to take on a hazy glow. It would have seemed like the end of the world.’
