Dinosaurs really were destroyed by an asteroid, study shows. Scientists have long theorized that the dinosaurs met their demise at the hands of a giant asteroid, but the circumstances of such an event have thus far remained murky.
Now, a team of American and European researchers have shed new light on the incident, lending extra weight to an already widely-adopted theory. Researchers have spent years trying to find a direct connection between the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (K-T, for short) and cosmic collision. They found a lead in the late 1970s, when geophysicist Glen Penfield discovered a giant prehistoric crater near the town of Chicxulub in Mexico.
At more than 110 miles wide, the crater provided evidence of an utterly massive impact — one that would have released an explosion one billion times stronger than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The only problem, however, was figuring out whether this asteroid's collision actually coincided with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Every meteorite fall on earth mapped. Turn autoplay off Edition: <span><a href=" Beta About us Today's paper.
Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010. Metéore - Seine et Marne (Meaux ) 21/10/2011 vers 21h05 - Page 10.