The last spring of the dinosaurs

Sixty-six million years ago, the dinosaurs had a really bad day.

Not just them, either, since 75% of the species on Earth disappeared in a short time. There’s no doubt now that the main driver of this mass murder, called the K-Pg extinction event, was an enormous asteroid (or possibly comet) impact, an object 10 kilometers across that slammed into the planet just off the coast of modern-day Yucatan. This created a crater some 150 kilometers wide, and instigated a series of catastrophic events b...