Did dark matter do in the dinosaurs?

EVERY 250m years the sun, with its entourage of planets, completes a circuit of the Milky Way. Its journey around its home galaxy, though, is no stately peregrination. Rather, its orbit oscillates up and down through the galactic disc, the place where most of the galaxy’s matter is concentrated. It passes through that disc once every 30m years or so.

This fact has long interested Michael Rampino of New York University. He speculates that it could explain the mass extinctions, such as that of the dinosaurs and many other species 66m years ago, that life on Earth undergoes from time to time. Palaeontologists recognise five such humongous events, when up to 90% of species have disappeared. But the fossil record is also littered with smaller, though still significant, blips in the diary of life.