Dark matter helped destroy the dinosaurs, physicist posits
Book’s unusual theory offers excuse to explore cosmology, paleontology
By Andrew Grant
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
Lisa Randall
ECCO, $29.99
Dark matter. Dinosaurs. Few topics are as effective at grabbing the attention of science enthusiasts. But Lisa Randall doesn’t just muse about these topics for their popular appeal. The accomplished particle physicist’s latest book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, draws on her 2014 study positing that mysterious invisible matter permeating the cosmos can dislodge comets from their orbits and trigger the kind of impact that wiped out T. rex and friends.