When the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs slammed into the planet 66 million years ago, the impact set wildfires, triggered tsunamis and blasted so much sulfur into the atmosphere that it blocked the sun, which caused the global cooling that ultimately doomed our giant predecessors. That’s the scenario scientists have hypothesized. Now, a new […]
An excavation site in North Dakota sheds new light on what happened when a giant meteorite struck planet Earth, 66 million years ago. On that day, violent ground shaking first raised giant waves in the waters of an ancient inland sea. Then tiny beads began to fall, created from molten rock cooling at the […]
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he largest extinction in Earth’s history marked the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. Long before dinosaurs, our planet was populated with plants and animals that were mostly obliterated after a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. Fossils in ancient seafloor rocks display a thriving and diverse marine ecosystem, […]
During the late Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago, hundreds of different species of birds flitted around the dinosaurs and through the forests as abundantly as they flit about our woods and fields today. But after the cataclysm that wiped out most of the dinosaurs, only one group of birds remained: the ancestors […]