Not now, Lovecraft

In the midst of everything else happening at the moment, I feel that the last thing we need right now is the discovery of the city of the Great Race of Yith and the half-polypous horrors from even greater antiquity that drove them to flee millions of years into the future and rendered the creatures their minds had inhabited extinct. Alternately, maybe extinction is exactly what we do need just now…

Actrually, the real story is just as interesting as Lovecraft’s (if not potentially a bit more alarming in a different way); this geologist reckons it’s actually a buried crater about 300 miles across, which would make it nearly three times the size of the Chicxulub crater which is thought to have been where the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs hit. If this was an impact crater (and unfortunately there’s no real evidence yet that it is, apparently that’ll require a lot of obtain either way), the rock that made it must have been a motherfucker of a thing to leave that much of a crater. Gilkson reckons that if he’s right about it being an impact crater, then it probably hit around 445m years ago, or about the time of a mass extinction that wiped out 85% of all life on Earth… but did it leave room for a species of “immense rugose cones ten feet high”? And are we better off not knowing for sure?