The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

by Steve Brusatte

where things stood 66 million years ago. This whole suite of birds and other airborne dinosaurs was there, gliding and flapping overhead, when T. rex and Triceratops were duking it out in North America, carcharodontosaurs were chasing titanosaurs south of the equator, and dwarf dinosaurs were hopping across the islands of Europe. And then they witnessed what came next, the instant that snuffed out almost all of the dinosaurs, all but a few of the most advanced, best-adapted, best-flying birds, which made it through the carnage and are still with us today—among

IT WAS THE WORST DAY in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course.

Next, the ground beneath their feet started to rumble, then to shake, and then to flow. Like waves. Pulses of energy were shooting through the rocks and soil, the ground rising and falling, as if a giant snake were slithering underneath. Everything not rooted into the dirt was thrown upward; then it crashed down, and then up and down again, the Earth’s surface having turned into a trampoline. Small dinosaurs and the little mammals and lizards were catapulted upward, then splattered onto trees and rocks when they landed.

Then the rains came. But what fell from the sky was not water. It was beads of glass and chunks of rock, each one scalding hot. The pea-size morsels pelted the surviving dinosaurs, gouging deep burns into their flesh. Many of them were gunned down, and their shredded corpses joined the earthquake

The atmosphere grew hotter, until the surface of the Earth became an oven. Forests spontaneously ignited and wildfires swept across the land. The surviving animals were now roasting, their skin and bones cooking at temperatures that instantaneously produce third-degree burns.

Still, animals had survived—some of the mammals and lizards were underground, some of the crocodiles and turtles were underwater, and some of the birds had been able to fly to safer refuges.

Some two and a half hours after the first light flash, the clouds began to howl. The soot in the atmosphere began to swirl into tornadoes. And then—woosh—the wind charged across the plains and through the river valleys, blowing at hurricane force, hard enough to make many of the rivers and lakes burst their banks.

Along with the wind was a deafening noise, louder than anything these dinosaurs had ever heard. Then another. Sound travels much slower than light, and these were the sonic booms that occurred at the same time as the two light flashes, caused by the distant horror that had started the chain reaction of brimstone hours earlier.

While all of this was happening in western North America, other parts of the world were going through their own upheavals.

had to deal with quaking ground, wildfires, and intense heat, and many of them died during those same chaotic two hours

worse. Much of the mid-Atlantic coast was sliced apart by tsunamis twice as tall as the Empire State Building, which flushed the carcasses of plesiosaurs and other sea-dwelling giant reptiles far inland. Volcanoes started to spew out rivers of lava in India. And a zone of Central America and southern North America—everything within a radius of about six hundred miles (one thousand kilometers) of the Yucatán Peninsula of modern-day Mexico—was annihilated. Vaporized.

When night finally came and this most horrible of days finally was over, many—maybe even most—of the dinosaurs were dead, all over the world.

Some did stagger on, however, into the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, and the next decades.

the Earth turned cold and dark because soot and rock dust lingered in the atmosphere and blocked out the sun. The darkness brought cold—a nuclear winter that only the hardiest of animals could survive. The darkness also made it very difficult for plants to subsist, as they need sunlight to power photosynthesis to make their food. As plants died, food chains collapsed like a house of cards, killing off many of the animals that had been able to endure the cold. Something similar happened in the oceans, where the death of photosynthesizing plankton took out the larger plankton and fish that fed on them and in turn the giant reptiles at the top of the food pyramid.

The sun did eventually break through the darkness, as the soot and other gunk was leached out of the atmosphere by rainwater. These rains, however, were highly acidic and would have scalded much of the Earth’s surface.

And the rain was not able to remove some ten trillion tons of carbon dioxide that had been blown up into the sky with the soot. CO2 is a nasty greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere,...

A few hundred years after that dreadful day—a few thousand years at the absolute most—western North America was a scarred, post-apocalyptic landscape.

Here and there, the odd lizard scurried through the bushes, some crocodiles and turtles paddled in the rivers, and rat-size mammals periodically peeked out of their burrows. A few birds were still around, picking at seeds still buried in the soil, but all the other dinosaurs were gone.

WHAT HAPPENED ON that day—when the Cretaceous ended with a bang and the dinosaurs’ death warrant was signed—was a catastrophe of unimaginable scale that, thankfully, humankind has never experienced. A comet or an asteroid—we aren’t sure which—collided with the Earth, hitting what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It was about six miles (ten kilometers) wide, or about the size of Mount Everest. It was probably moving at a speed of around 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour), more than a hundred times faster than a jet airliner. When it slammed into our planet, it hit with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, somewhere in the vicinity of a billion nuclear bombs’ worth of energy. It plowed some twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) through the crust and into the mantle, leaving a crater that was over 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide. The impact made

All creatures living within six hundred miles (a thousand kilometers) or so of the Yucatán would have been instantly turned into ghosts.

The first flash of light occurred as the asteroid punched through the Earth’s atmosphere and violently compressed the air in front of it, so much that the air became four or five times as hot as the surface of the sun and ignited. The second flash was the impact itself, when asteroid met bedrock.

These earthquakes were probably around 10 on the Richter scale—far more powerful than anything human civilizations have ever coped with. Some of these earthquakes triggered the Atlantic tsunamis, which ripped up house-size boulders and flung them far inland; others kicked the Indian volcanoes into hyperdrive, and they kept erupting for thousands of years, compounding everything else the asteroid had wrought.

The energy from the collision vaporized the asteroid and the bedrock that it hit. Dust, dirt, rock, and other debris from the collision shot up into the sky—most as vapor or liquid but some as small but still solid pieces of rock.

The soot from the fires, with other dust and grime kicked up by the impact but too light to fall back down to earth, would have floated up into the atmosphere, clogging the currents that circulate air across the globe, until the entire planet was dark.

The ensuing period—thought to be equivalent to a global nuclear winter—probably killed off most of the dinosaurs in areas far from the smoldering crater.