Dinosaurs are the biggest creatures to have ever walked on land, dominating Earth for over 130 million years. But how could such extraordinary creatures have simply vanished in the blink of a geological eye? For decades, we鈥檝e assumed these prehistoric megafauna 鈥� a staple of our childhoods and Hollywood movies 鈥� went extinct for one simple reason: the asteroid that hit Earth was so unimaginably large that it changed everything in one single blow. But now, thanks to new research, an even more intriguing idea has emerged: size alone doesn鈥檛 explain what happened.
The real reason the impact was so devastating may have been its angle. Had the asteroid arrived a little steeper, the outcome might have been different. A little shallower, different again. And for life on Earth at the time, predominantly dinosaurs on land, marine creatures in the sea and pterosaurs in the air, it appears to have struck at almost the worst possible angle imaginable, launching vast quantities of rock, dust and climate-altering gases high into the atmosphere and triggering one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth鈥檚 history.