Irony of ironies. The Chixchulub crater was found by PEMEX, they were looking for oil...
Yeah, exactly. That was circa 1960. About 1970 someone floated the idea (in a scientific paper) that the dinos got snuffed by a huge impact and that was quickly ignored and forgotten, and no one connected those dots. In 1980 the “Snowbird” conferences were organized to summit and share regarding the Alvarez model of impact, and someone who remembered the drill cores from 1960 wrote to Luis Alvarez — no response. The Chicxulub crater was identified at last around 1990. Early in 1993 the Shoemakers and Levy discovered SL-9, which slammed piece by piece into Jupiter beginning in mid-1994. Systematic searches for Earth-crossing objects was finally organized on a broad scale thereafter.