Word: gubbio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...revolution began with an unassuming element known as iridium, a rare and hard silvery-white metal related to platinum and gold. In the spring of 1977, Geologist Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, was carefully chiseling through the rocks outside Gubbio, a medieval Italian town halfway between Florence and Rome, seeking clues to continental drift. Gubbio has long been an appealing site to geologists and paleontologists because its rocks provide a complete geological record of the critical boundary line between the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared, and the Tertiary period, which followed...