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Survival in the first hours of the Cenozoic

Douglas S. Robertson^,1, Malcolm C. McKenna^,2, Owen B. Toon^,3, Sylvia Hope^,4 and Jason A. Lillegraven^,5

¹ Department of Geological Sciences and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
² Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming 82071-3006, USA, and University of Colorado Museum, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
³ Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
⁴ Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California 94118, USA
⁵ Department of Geology and Geophysics and Department of Zoology and Physiology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming 82071-3006, USA

For several hours following the Chicxulub impact, the entire Earth was bathed with intense infrared radiation from ballistically reentering ejecta. The global heat pulse would have killed unsheltered organisms directly and ignited fires at places where adequate fuel was available. Sheltering underground, within natural cavities, or in water would have been a necessary but not always sufficient condition for survival. Survival through sheltering from an initial thermal pulse is not adequately considered in literature about Cretaceous- Tertiary nonmarine extinctions. We compare predicted intense, short-term, thermal effects with what is known about the fossil record of nonmarine vertebrates and suggest that paleontological evidence of survival is compatible with theoretical results from bolide physics.

Key Words: bolide physics • Chicxulub • Cretaceous • evolution • extinction • extraterrestrial impact • infrared radiation • nonmarine • Paleocene • survival • Tertiary • vertebrates

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