In the wake of the event, as many as 75 percent of all species were wiped out. Heat generated by ejecta falling back to Earth ignited wildfires worldwide that blazed for months, if not years. Some of the sulfur-rich debris poisoned the sky, unleashing downpours of acid rain.
The impact blasted out an enormous crater and heaved large amounts of material into the atmosphere. But this worst single day in the history of life on Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years.Ī Macmillan Audio production from St.Some 66 million years ago, give or take several millennia, a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid slammed into our planet. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanished seemingly overnight. An asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter.
The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks listeners through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe.
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