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

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 an atom bomb look like a Fourth of July cherry bomb. It was a bad time to be alive.