-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Gerta Keller is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, where she has been a tenured faculty member since 1984. She has placed over 260 scientific publications in international journals and is considered a leading authority on catastrophes, mass extinctions, and the biotic and environmental effects of impacts and volcanism. She has coauthored five academic books, including Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, Chicxulub and the KTB Mass Extinction in Texas, and Micropaleontology and Stratigraphy: Global Bioevents in Earth's History. She is a frequent lecturer and regularly receives invitations from academic institutions around the world. In recent years, her work has received increased recognition and continues to make waves in the mainstream media, including TV documentaries and news features, radio and podcast interviews, as well as print and web media, most notably in a widely circulated profile in The Atlantic.
Gerta Keller's website
This bio was last updated on 10/08/2025. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
What do most people think caused the dinosaurs to become extinct?
If you ask a random person on the street, there's a very good chance they'll say it was an asteroid. Impact theory is the popular, albeit incorrect, belief that an asteroid crashed into Yucatan, Mexico, and caused the mass extinction of about 70% of the species 66 million years ago. This belief was first promoted in 1980 when Nobel Prize physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter claimed the presence of the rare earth element Iridium proved the impact theory. This conclusion was always doubtful, but few scientists dared to question Iridium's origin. And so, Iridium remained the unquestioned elephant in the room of impact theory for decades.
By 2017, I had almost given up hope of finding the true source of the Iridium anomaly. In early February of that year, I lectured in Tallahassee, Florida, where I met an astrochemist, which is a person who knows the chemistry of asteroids. He was also an "impactor," which means he firmly believed in the impact theory. But he was open-minded and ready to investigate the evidence we had found, which indicated that the Iridium had instead come from volcanic eruptions in India—and had surfaced from deep within ...
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Last Extinction
Try:
Eve
by Cat Bohannon
Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Last Extinction
Try:
The Code Breaker
by Walter Isaacson
We recommend 3 similar authors
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
