Feeling A Little Guilty Now
After a google search for "Uluru meteor dinosaur", I turned up this article on the Quantum website (http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/rumble)
An extract here suggests its not a totally unreasonable thing that my Swiss friend was taught in school...
"5,000 years ago, aboriginal Australians witnessed the titanic collision of a meteor near Uluru in central Australia. The event was spectacular enough to have been passed down through 5 millennia of oral history. Only in the last decade has there been a serious attempt to collate the record of these events as written on the surface of the Earth. With the bombardment of Jupiter by the comet Shoemaker Levy 9, suddenly the mechanism that was probably responsible, not only for ending the rule of dinosaurs but probably other prominent biological extinctions as well, was on public display. With 'ground truth' from the jungle of Brazil, we will once again have to re-assess our lack of respect for cataclysms that fall from the sky."
Interesting... still a bit funny though - I had this picture of all of the dinosaurs in the world having a conference in the middle of Australia and this great rock falling on them, wiping them out entirely...
posted by rovert74 at 2:19 AM
2 Comments:
Hmmm. I recall Uluru being a massive rock on a flat plane. There was no crater, so I find it hard to believe that it was a meteor.
I expect that Europeans find it hard to relate to the age of Australia and the fact that much of it has been eroded. Over there, I expect it's more common that a land feature was created relatively recently by earth movement or glaciers. So it's probably tempting to view an unusual formation like Uluru as extra-terrestrial in origin.
1:18 AM
Uluru's been there a lot longer than 5000 years !! It's made of sandstone - a sedimentary rock formed at the bottom of a sea or lake. Meteors are never made of sedimentary rock :-)
12:06 PM
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