Extinction of Dinosaurs: Consensus Reached . . . mostly

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The paper also, bizarely, claims that "[t]he scale of biological turnover between the Cretaceous and Paleogene is nearly unprecedented in Earth history". And supports it with a reference neatly detailing the other mass extinctions... umm? And that's the real problem I have with impact explainations for the extinction of the dinosaurs - there is no evidence of impacts that co-incide with prior mass extinctions. It seems to me that the search for abiotic explainations of mass extinctions is missing the big picture: extinction seems to be a property of evolutionary systems.

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??? What about the iridium anomaly near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary? Or the one at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary? Or shocked quartz at the same boundary? Or chondritic meteorite fragments and shocked quartz at the Permian-Triassic boundary? All of these are evidence of impacts.

Yes, the evidence for impacts at other extinctions is not so strong as the K-T and is disputed. But the claim that "there is no evidence of impacts" or that there is "no empirical evidence" is blatantly false. (And remember that the evidence for an impact at the K-T was hotly disputed for nearly a decade before general acceptance.)