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We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime. Most scientists agree the disaster was an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most...

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt. Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper...

Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a Palaeontologist at University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, is among those that have questions around the extraordinary claims made by the team that have... ... said he was “very excited about this discovery” but noted aside from a single partial dinosaur hip bone mentioned in the paper, ideas of a dinosaur graveyard being reported in the media lack any real evidence so far. “The New Yorker article reports a dinosaur graveyard with bones of many types of dinosaurs, along with feathers, eggs, and even embryos,” he said. “I’m afraid...

66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor By Robert Sanders, Media relations| March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) A meteor impact 66 million years ago generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur, the first victims of Earth’s last mass extinction event. The death scene from within an hour of...

The researchers say they found evidence in North Dakota of the asteroid hit in Mexico, including fish with hot glass in their gills from flaming debris that showered back down on Earth. They also reported the discovery of charred trees, evidence of an inland tsunami and melted amber. Additionally, University of Amsterdam professor Jan Smit said he and his colleagues found footsteps from dinosaurs moments before they met their untimely death. Smit said the footprints — one from a plant-eating hadrosaur and the other of a meat eater, maybe a small Tyrannosaurus Rex — is "definite proof that the dinosaurs...

The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event. Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of...

More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment. Now analysis of commercial oil drilling data—denied to the academic community until recently—offers the first detailed look at how the Chicxulub impact reshaped the Gulf of Mexico. Figuring out what happened after these types of impacts gives researchers a better idea of how they redistribute geological material around the world. It also gives scientists an idea of what to expect if another such impact were to occur...

Study of fossil shells solves unanswered question of how deep sea creatures survived asteroid strike during immense upheaval of the world's oceans... Like the dinosaurs themselves, giant marine reptiles, invertebrates and microscopic organisms became extinct after the catastrophic asteroid impact in an immense upheaval of the world's oceans, yet deep sea creatures managed to survive. This has puzzled researchers as it is widely believed that the asteroid impact cut off the food supply in the oceans by destroying free-floating algae and bacteria. However, in a study published in the April issue of the journal Geology, a team led by researchers...

New research led by the American Museum of Natural History reveals that the evolution of modern birds was greatly shaped by the history of our planet's geography and climate. The DNA-based work, published today in the journal Science Advances, finds that birds arose in what is now South America around 90 million years ago, and radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. The new research suggests that birds in South America survived this event and then started moving to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during...

Here, for the first time (to our knowledge), we are able to demonstrate unambiguously that the impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg, ∼66 Mya) was followed by a so-called “impact winter.” This impact winter was the result of the injection of large amounts of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere and significantly reduced incoming solar radiation for decades. Therefore, this phase will have been a key contributory element in the extinctions of many biological clades, including the dinosaurs. The K–Pg boundary impact presents a unique event in Earth history because it caused global change at an unparalleled rate. This detailed...