“This is where we get to the great irony of the story – because in the end it wasn’t the size of the asteroid, the scale of blast, or even its global reach that made dinosaurs extinct – it was where the impact happened,” said Ben Garrod, who presents the BBC documentary The Day The Dinosaurs Died (watch video below).
Scientists drilled into the Chicxulub crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago creating the niche that made the rise of homo sapiens possible. The 15 km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.
“All these fossils occur in a layer no more than 10cm thick,” said palaeontologist Ken Lacovara. “They died suddenly and were buried quickly. It tells us this is a moment in geological time. That’s days, weeks, maybe months. But this is not thousands of years; it’s not hundreds of thousands of years. This is essentially an instantaneous event.”
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