Scientists pinpoint the moment 66 million years ago that life was nearly wiped off Earth

University of Kansas paleontologist Robert DePalma and colleagues said the excavation site, called Tanis, offered a momentous peek into events that occurred minutes after the asteroid crashed into the planet.

“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with (the end of the Cretaceous Period),” said DePalma.

“At no other (time) on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.”

Scientists pinpoint the moment 66 million years ago that life was nearly wiped off Earth


66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor

The asteroid hit the Earth and unleashed more than a billion times the energy of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This event changed the entire history of the Earth. The asteroid hitting Earth ensured mammals would inherit the Earth, not the dinosaurs.

This video gives an idea of what is was like when this asteroid hit the Earth.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

Cool assemblage of fossils , after 66 million years their story can be told , they died so we could live.

Interesting, but Just a Theory. There is no way they can exactly equate the extinction to one ten decade yet alone a day. There is no way that the evidence can prove that this extinction was world wide or region wide and that it coincided with the asteroid for sure. I spent years over a decade ago studying all of the paleontology stuff and going over the evidence and commenting on some things. At the time, I was accepting the versions that these people were saying was true, but you cannot have ten completely different things all being true. Since that time there have been even more theories, most don't match up. These are just people's theories about what happened, any one of them would be impossible to prove is right.

I know how they create them and I know those who make these theories and those who believe in them will support them even if they are proved false.

The theory is interesting, but there is no way in hell that we could figure out what did that extinction long ago.

I like that people have new theories to look at, keeping an open mind with those kind of things eventually could lead to a better explanation of what actually may have happened. Just because this guy is a professional, does not mean his theory is correct. I cannot tell you anything is correct or not, I do not know if any of anything is real before the first I can remember happened. Half the stuff in our History books is opinions, the opinions being the accepted conseses of the time when they were when they happened and the acceptability of the information at the present time by those who teach it or control what we are allowed to believe. Half of our written history is not totally correct.

Great thread! This event could've been far worse....Earth could've exploded into an expanding plasma cloud, as shown in the video clip below. Thankfully, these events are quite rare, but the results would be catastrophic for all life on Earth. Instead of venturing back to the moon, or sending out more probes, shouldn't we fund and develop an effective, fully operational Asteroid Protection Plan first?

This is why Lu and others are pushing for better detection capabilities now. It could take more than a decade to fully design and equip a mission to coax an asteroid off its path toward Earth, so early warning will be key.

We seem to have a tough time grappling with the consequences of events that we haven’t personally experienced, and sometimes fail to take the necessary precautions. The 2011 Fukushima disaster and the failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina are prime examples.

“It’s not as small as you think, it’s just that it’s longer than a generation,” Lu says. “If it didn’t happen in your lifetime, you naturally discount it.”

blogs.discovermagazine.com...

a reply to: LookingAtMars

I cant help but think that was the vehicle that carried our variant of DNA or something which mixed with the DNA on earth and began a new 'human' strain. The day the Earth became infected with its biggest threat ever, US

a reply to: rickymouse

It's a theory, but there's a lot of evidence to support it, evidence of extinction around that timeframe along with much higher levels of iridium around that timeframe as well.

Fascinating thread by the way.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

That is what they were paid to say,much evidence of devastation,land masses have come and gone,then come back,elevations have changed,extinct animals found frozen,and they were just a hew thousands of years old,we have been lied to,history is a story made up by those who have knowledge

What a thing to witness.