Dinosaur Extinction Lab Report

The end of the dinosaurs was thought to come because of an abrupt catastrophic event, a massive asteroid hitting the Earth. The Paleozoic Period was the time of the dinosaur’s existence, and the Mesozoic Period was after the death of the dinosaurs. Based on evidence, scientists have hypothesized that a giant asteroid hit the Earth at the end of the Paleozoic Period to start the Mesozoic. This catastrophic asteroid was massive and because it was so large the asteroid made a gigantic crater in addition to blocking out the sun and heating up the air, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. After the extinction of dinosaurs was the evolution of the mammals which eventually led to us, humans. In this lab, we studied the relationship of mass of an “asteroid” to the crater impact size. We hypothesized that as the mass of the ball, which we used in place of a real asteroid, got larger the crater size would grow because when objects have a greater mass they

It was linear data, and the linear regression fit very well. The is is shown by the R2 value in both graphs. The R2 value shows how well the line fits the data, and the R2 value goes from 1 to 0. 1 meaning that the data points are a perfect fit and 0 meaning that the points are total chaos. In our Width vs. Mass graph, our R2 value was 1, which means that the data was completely linear. In our Depth vs. Mass graph, our R2 value was 0.997, which means that the data was almost linear. We had no outliers; if we did, then the R2 value would not have been as close to 1 as it was. The most likely reason for our minimal mistake was mismeasuring the depth of the balls because this was an extremely small and challenging measurement to make accurately. The slope of linear regression are positive values, which means that for both graphs, as the mass increased, so did the depth and width of the crater. This proves that our hypothesis was correct because we predicted this same