Wipe-out: How a Terrible Asteroid Impact Wiped Out the Dinosaurs

So what happened to the non-avian dinosaurs? The rocks speak clearly for themselves: after dinosaurs had dominated life on land for more than 160 million years, from about 65.5 million years ago another mass extinction occurred and all traces of dinosaur fossils disappear completely.

It wasn’t just the dinosaurs that were wiped out. The last of the pterosaurs, the flying reptiles, also vanished, as did all the sea reptiles except for the turtles which somehow survived. It was also the end of the road for the ammonites, those bizarre spiral-shaped fossils, relations of today’s octopus and squid.

Life on Earth survives inside a thin, delicate layer of atmospheric skin on top of a lump of hard, lifeless rock. That’s exactly how it would have looked to the six-mile-wide asteroid hurtling towards Earth 65.5 million years ago at a speed of some 70,000mph. Far in the distance, a bright blue-green dot would have been gradually growing larger and larger by the day. As the dark chunk of deadly rock and ice made its final approach, planet Earth would have resembled a sparkling bright jewel in a void, black sea of space.

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February 12, 2009