What Really Killed The Dinosaurs?

A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. Her fight with the asteroid camp may be the nastiest feud in all of science— but she’s reopened a debate that had been considered closed.

- Bianca Bosker

1 GERTA KELLER WAS waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster. Long before our 90-minute flight touched down, she’d told me about having narrowly escaped death four times—once while attempt ing suicide, once from hepatitis contracted during an Alge rian coup, once from getting shot in a robbery gone wrong, and once from food poisoning in India— and this was by no means an exhaus tive list. She has crisscrossed dozens of countries doing field research and can claim near-death experiences in many of them: with a tiger in Belize, an anaconda in Madagascar, a mob in Haiti, an uprising in Mexico.