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Lunchtime mistake could lead scientists to better understand the demise of dinosaurs

Scientists working for a university in Switzerland have tried to replicate the forming of fossils in laboratory conditions, using a clever technique which speeds the millions of year’s process up to just a few days. However, they have found that regular rock compounds cannot form fossils to the same quality that they have been found naturally across the world.

Scientists began experimenting with other natural substances, to try to find something that worked, and which might give them a better clue as to how the fossils were formed millions of years ago.

By mistake, thanks to a particularly careless scientist, a remarkable discovery has been made.

Eating his lunch whilst working on some of the samples, a piece of cheese must have fallen out of his sandwich. When the scientist came to check the results several days later, he found that the sea salt compound he was testing had produced disappointing results, but that the area where he had dropped the cheese had produced a perfect fossil.

“I thought my sandwich had tasted unusually bland that day,’ said the professor, ‘but it wasn’t until I investigated the results of the sample I was working on that I realised what must have happened!”

This experiment was repeated with phenomenal results. However, when scientists attempted the same test with various combinations of the elements which make up the cheese, the same level of fossilisation could not be achieved. It seems that only the complete cheese mixture produces these results.

This is a discovery in its early stages of development, and scientists are unclear what this might mean for modern palaeontology. An early hypothesis (playfully named ‘the nacho theory’ within the scientific community) suggests that the meteor shower widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaur population may have come from the breakdown of a cheese-rich planet. The meteors would have melted on contact with the Earth’s warm atmosphere and effectively drowned the creatures in a sea of melted cheese, perfectly fossilising them. Being such a rich substance, this would also explain the fast regeneration of the planet, an element of the meteor theory which has baffled scientists for some time.

The laboratory continues to test their theories, and is open to offers of sponsorship from any of the major cheese brands, to help fund the research.

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