Mystery Behind Dinosaur Demise 'Revealed'

1:00pm UK, Friday March 05, 2010
Lulu Sinclair, Sky News Online

A massive asteroid was to blame for the demise of the dinosaur, and not a volcanic eruption, scientists have finally agreed.

The team of 41 international scientists came to their conclusion after analysing the past 20 years of research.

The mass extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs and some large marine reptiles, the scientists decided.

They concluded the impact, that happened around 65 million years ago, cleared the way for mammals to become Earth's dominant species.

The 15-kilometre wide asteroid is believed to have hit the planet with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

It resulted in the crater known as the Chicxulub crater buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula.

The asteroid - about the size of the Isle of Wight - would have blasted material at high speed into the atmosphere.

That set off a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days, the review says.

Scientists had previously argued about whether the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT)extinction was caused by the asteroid or by volcanic activity in India over 1.5 million years.

For the new study, scientists analysed 20 years of work by palaeontologists, geochemists, climate modellers, geophysicists and sedimentologists.

They concluded that geological records show the event that triggered the extinction destroyed marine and land ecosystems rapidly, meaning an asteroid impact was the only plausible explanation.

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