Sandra flies from London to Palma de Mallorca. She flicks through the inflight magazine, British Airways News. Reports on wine production in Ribeiro and Rioja, the latest high-tech architecture works in Berlin, mail-order Majorica pearls. A tear falls onto a photo of a Caribbean beach, but the beach has not pricked it from her, and neither has the Caribbean, nor the gravity to which all tears are subject; she looks out the window, looks ahead, sees neither clouds nor earth. The verification of something she already knew: on aeroplanes, there is no horizon. She takes out the keys to her Churchill Street apartment, attached to a dinosaur keyring with a compass needle quivering in its head.
In the summer of 1993, the American palaeontologist Michael Novacek left behind the calm of his office at the American Museum of Natural History to lead an expedition of scientists in the inhospitable climes of the Gobi desert, where temperatures fluctuate between -45°C and 50°C. The former rock guitarist still laughs to remember their truck getting stuck in the sand and forcing them to stop by some outcrops. “We’d gone hoping to explore, and suddenly the trip was over.” They ended up finding the largest-known site of dinosaur and mammal bones from the Cretaceous period, a mine of extraordinary, 80-million-year-old fossils – predating by 15 million years the asteroid that brought an end to the dinosaurs.
Q: What happened in the Great Cretaceous Extinction?
A: We aren’t sure precisely. We know a mass extinction took place with 70 per cent of all marine and land-based species being wiped out. And we have evidence that an enormous object from space hit the earth at the same time, at a point in the Caribbean near the coast of modern-day Mexico. The impact caused huge destruction and brought about drastic changes in the atmosphere, sending temperatures so high that some organisms were literally cooked alive and a wave of huge fires broke out across the planet. However, it’s the mammals rather than the dinosaurs that I focus on. Dinosaurs are the past, mammals are the future – after all they filled the gap left by the extinct dinosaurs.
Michael Novacek interview
El País, March 16, 2005