An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring—which might explain why mammals survived

A catastrophic event wiped out most of the plant and animal species on Earth 66 million years ago. Scientists have long been curious about why so many species perished.

The timing of the impact is one of the reasons for evolutionary selectivity according to a new paper. The extinction event occurred in the spring in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the analysis of fish killed immediately after the impact.

The most widely accepted explanation for what triggered the mass extinction is called the "Alvarez hypothesis", after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter. The extinction event may have been caused by an asteroid or comet.

The most likely culprit is an asteroid from the asteroid belt. The comet was thrown off course by Jupiter. The broadly accepted consensus is an asteroid.

The most likely impact site is a large crater that was discovered in the late 1970s in Mexico. A paper published in Nature Communications in 2020 concluded that the impactor hit at the worst possible angle and caused the most damage.

The impactor was large enough to melt, shock, and send granite from deep inside the Earth into the atmosphere. Geological evidence for large-scale forest fires has been documented. The impact would have released more energy than the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. mass extinction was caused by all of this, leading to a devastating effect on global climate.

The K-Pg extinction event is a puzzle for scientists. Many species of mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles survived after the dinosaurs were wiped out. The seasonal timing of the impact event may have an effect on which species die and which survive.