A Buried Oklahoma Crater Was Dated to the Wrong Era—and It Actually Lines Up With a Mass Extinction

In 1991, an oil company discovered a giant crater buried under Ames, Oklahoma. Subsequent investigations led researchers to propose the meteor responsible for the structure belonged to the many meteors that struck North America some 470 million years ago. New dating, however, challenges this account—while proposing an entirely different context for this enigmatic crater.

According to a recently published study in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, researchers dated zircon crystals from the site and found that the Ames crater likely formed…