The April shower that took place 66 million years ago did not, in fact, result in May flowers. Rather, when a meteor the size of a small city crashed into Earth near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico that spring, it triggered a cascade of events that caused the death of three quarters of all life on Earth. Such is the conclusion of the researchers behind a new study, published today (February 24) in Nature, who analyzed the bones of several fish supposedly killed following the impact and determined that the meteor likely struck during spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
“It’s amazing that we can take an event, a single moment that happened 66 million years ago—literally a rock falling down and in an instant striking the Earth—and we can pinpoint that event to a particular time of the year,” Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of ...
