That's the message from a team of planetary scientists, who have explained Venus' apparent dearth of large craters by discovering that impacts could have produced the mysterious "tesserae" formations on the Venusian surface.

Tesserae are large  sometimes continent-size  expanses of terrain that have been deformed and covered with wrinkle ridges, which make the landforms look like sheets of corrugated iron. They are formed by lava welling up to the surface, where it cools and hardens, while denser material left in the mantle below a tessera forms a plateau made from a substance called residuum. Sometimes that residuum can be swept away by the flowing mantle around it, allowing the tessera to sink back down to surface level. Now, a team of planetary scientists consisting of Ivan López at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Evan Bjonnes of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Vicki Hansen of Arizona's Planetary Science Institute, has connected these tesserae regions with impacts.