To put the scale of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in perspective: it hit the Earth so hard that are likely bits of dinosaurs ON THE MOON!
And this paper shows that those chunks could have survived to now intact, testing it by actually shooting frozen fossils at targets.
And this paper shows that those chunks could have survived to now intact, testing it by actually shooting frozen fossils at targets.
https://twitter.com/latestinspace/status/1484538491837063168
But the asteroid likely did not wipe out an advanced dinosaur civilization... probably. (It is surprisingly hard to tell after 65 million years, even radioactive waste would decay away, and the continents themselves have shifted)
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1484052112409608193?s=20
One other impact of the dinosaur-killing asteroid: it led indirectly to the Mayan Empire. Mayan cities were located within the 65M year old buried crater of that meteor because the impact changed the geology of the region, giving the area its cenote pools with rare fresh water.
The fall of the Mayans may also be linked to a meteor. Famine was frequent as agricultural production was limited to human power, because there were no draft animals. Why? Maybe this: a crater from 10,800 BCE shows a big impact at the same time as American megafauna went extinct!
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