Instead, you have to turn to the geological record.

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Although there were no machines for detecting them systematically before 1935, cosmic rays have left their footprints in the geological record by creating radioactive elements such as the carbon-14 used in carbon-dating.

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The new date for the impact (66, 038, 000 years ago) narrows what's been dubbed the 'three metre gap' in the geological record between the demise of the dinosaurs and the asteroid impact to just 18, 000 years.

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We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth's atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times.

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New disciplines emerged like archaeoseismology, which draws on both the geological and archaeological record to identify past earthquakes.

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Prof Barnosky and colleagues compared the rates of known species extinctions in mammals, birds and amphibians during the last five centuries with those estimated from the fossil record during the previous Big Five die-outs of the geological past.

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The question is one of the most hotly contested in palaeontology and revolves around an apparent gap in the fossil record immediately prior to the K-T boundary - the distinct layer of geological sediments separating the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, and associated with a massive asteroid impact and global extinction event.

BBC: Closing the 'three metre gap'