How reliable is walter alvarez s theory on dinosaurs?
In 1980, Alvarez unveiled a scientific finale which would bring him greater worldwide recognition than all of his previous work. Working with his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist, the father–son team “uncovered a calamity that literally shook the Earth and is one of the great discoveries about Earth’s history”[1] Walter Alvarez was doing geological research in central Italy during the 1970s on the walls of a gorge whose limestone layers included strata both above and below the so-called K–T boundary (sometimes called the K-Pg), the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods corresponding to a time of 65.95 million years ago (Kuiper et al., 2008). Exactly at the boundary is a layer of clay about 1 cm thick. Walter removed a small piece of the rock containing both sections of limestone and the clay layer and later showed it to his father. Walter said “This layer marks where the dinosaurs and much else went extinct. Nobody knows why. Or what the clay is about. A big mystery!”, an
