According to a new study published in Science Advances, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was a bit of a weird-o, as mass murderers tend to be. It wasn’t the antisocial freak that neighbors would later claim they always suspected, but recent discoveries are forcing scientists to rethink what they thought they knew about the space rock responsible for Earth’s most infamous extinction event.
About 66 million years ago, a roughly six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, wiping out around 75 percent of all species, including every non-bird dinosaur. The new findings don’t change the broader scope of the asteroid impact. It hit, and a bunch of stuff died. That much is the same. What’s changed is the identity of the asteroid itself.
By analyzing nickel isotopes preserved in the thin layer of clay left behind by the impact, researchers concluded that the “oddball” asteroid was an incredibly rare CO chondrite, a primitive type of meteorite that likely formed in the outer reaches of the solar system. Carbonaceous chondrites already account for less than 5 percent of meteorites found on Earth, and CO chondrites are only a tiny fraction of those.
It Wasn’t a One-in-a-Million Collision. It Was Worse Than That.
That’s all a very science-y way of saying that the dinosaurs weren’t just killed by a one in a million collision, but were struck by one of the rarest rocks in known space; the rarest of the rare. It also challenges the long-held belief that the sulfur released by the asteroid was a major reason sunlight was blocked, causing temperatures to plummet, which sparked a worldwide ecosystem collapse. That’s because CO chondrites contain relatively little sulfur, meaning that the real culprit was probably just the enormous cloud of fine dust particles that were blasted into the atmosphere after the impact.
The big cloud that blotted out the sun remains; its composition is what the new research suggests is different.
Other than that, the research doesn’t change much about the larger knowledge of the asteroid impact. It still unleashed hell upon the Earth, including global wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and a total collapse of the global food chain. But after decades of research, scientists are finding that the object that obliterated the dinosaurs was weirder and stranger than they had previously realized.
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