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We Are Pleased To Inform You There Are Probably Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

James Felton

James Felton

James Felton

James Felton

Senior Staff Writer

James is a published author with four pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.

Senior Staff Writer

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dinosaur on the moon

Image credit: jiangdi/Shutterstock.com, Space creator/Shutterstock.com/IFLScience

Right, strap in because this is a weird one. Thanks to a (glorious) piece of science writing that has been shared online over the last few days, people are now learning what astrophysicists and (possibly) astronauts have known for a long time: There are most likely tiny chunks of dinosaur sitting up there on the Moon.

Yes, that's right, dinosaurs beat us to it. Sixty-five million years before humankind took "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind", dinosaurs made it to our satellite, although to be fair their safety procedures weren't quite as rigorous as ours so they didn't so much step foot on the Moon as spray themselves across it like water from a Super Soaker.

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How did they get there, and possibly beyond? Yes, you guessed it, their version of a rocket ship (the impressive, terrifying idiots) was hitching a lift on the debris caused by the asteroid that wiped them out.

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When planets, like ours, are impacted by bodies from space, they are generally just left with a crater for people to gawp at.

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However, if the body is large enough and fast enough, the impact can cause debris to achieve escape velocity (11.2 kilometers a second) and leave our atmosphere entirely. A lot of it will fall back on the planet, but other pieces may be ejected from the planet's influence and head out into the Solar System, possibly putting them on collision courses with other planets.

We have a lot of evidence of this happening, with at least 289 meteorites that made it from impacts on Mars all the way to Earth discovered on our planet so far. Many moons in the Solar System are thought to have been created by gigantic impacts, including our own. It may even be possible for microorganisms to survive the journey from Earth to other planets or vice versa while hidden in rock, according to recent research.

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But back to the dinosaurs. As writer Peter Brannen explains in his book The Ends of the World, the meteor that hit Earth was traveling at such tremendous speed that "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. 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."

With the earth and rock went dinosaur bones. At the end of their world, little bits of them were buried on the Moon, and probably Mars too.


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