![]() (Gruithuisen probably didn’t help his cause by also claiming to have seen cows grazing upon moon grass in these craters.) Further misleading any theorists, astronomers could make out little mountains in the center of each depression. Instead, the mark will be oblong, oval, and messy. And, as anyone who has thrown a rock into dirt can tell you, that isn’t what an impact scar should look like. But most rejected this theory based upon one simple, supremely confounding fact: The moon’s craters are almost perfect circles. A few astronomers, like Franz von Gruithuisen, an early-19th-century German, proposed asteroid impacts as the cause. When Galileo trained his telescope on the moon in 1609 and discovered perfectly circular craters dominating its topography, astronomers began to wonder how they formed. And maybe move to the other side of the planet. You’ll want to pack up your tent before then. Then it will streak through the atmosphere, strike the earth, and unleash 100 million times more energy than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated. Look again the next night and it will be the brightest star in the sky. But look again a few hours later and you might think this new star seems a little brighter. It will appear as stationary and as twinkly as all the others. The star won’t flash, flare up, or blaze across the horizon. And just as you settle down on one particular evening, there’s a brand-new star in the northern hemisphere sky. There’s the tank-like ankylosaurus crushing opponents with its wrecking-ball tail. There’s the alamosaurus, one of the largest creatures to ever walk the earth. There’s the tyrannosaurus hunting the triceratops. ![]() So let’s say you spin the dials on a time machine to 66.5 million years ago and you travel back to the late Cretaceous period. You want to camp alongside the most famous. ![]() Let’s say for a moment you want to camp alongside the dinosaurs.
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