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Walter Alvarez.
T.Rex and the Crater of Doom.
Penguin. 1997

Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mount Everest fell from outer space and hit the Earth’s surface. The environmental disasters that followed brought about the mass extinction of vast numbers of animal and plant species, among them the great carnivorous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex.

In this thrilling tale of scientific detection, Walter Alvarez unfolds the quest for the answer to one of science’s greatest mysteries as he and a small team of other scientists searched for evidence of a cataclysmic impact. The impact theory was hotly disputed among the scientific community, for it overturned the traditionally held view that changes in Earth history were always gradual, but the debate also enlivened and transformed the geological sciences. Then, in 1991, after years of breakthroughs and failures, a massive crater buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula was discovered. Recognized as the largest impact crater on the planet, it provided irrefutable proof of the critical role played by rare but devastating catastrophes in the wholesale destruction of species, including the dinosaurs.

Walter Alvarez.
A Most Improbable Journey: a big history of our planet and ourselves.
WW Norton. 2017

Big History, the field that integrates traditional historical scholarship with scientific insights to study the full sweep of our universe, has so far been the domain of historians. Famed geologist Walter Alvarez—best known for the “Impact Theory” explaining dinosaur extinction—has instead championed a science-first approach to Big History. Here he wields his unique expertise to give us a new appreciation for the incredible occurrences—from the Big Bang to the formation of supercontinents, the dawn of the Bronze Age, and beyond—that have led to our improbable place in the universe.