Scientists believe they have proved a huge asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs — and say they would have survived if it had struck just moments earlier or later.
It’s commonly understood that the beasts were wiped out by an enormous impact 66 million years ago.
Now a team of scientists believe they have finally cracked the mystery of exactly what made the dinosaurs go extinct after a multimillion-pound drilling expedition deep into the Chicxulub crater.
The massive impact site is buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula, 24 miles from the coast of modern-day Mexico where the dinosaur-killing asteroid is thought to have struck.
Experts drilled through more than half a mile of solid rock to investigate remnants of the asteroid and discovered it was a whopping 9 miles wide.
Their findings also revealed that the space rock was traveling at 40,000 mph when it smashed into Earth, piercing a hole 20 miles deep and 120 miles across.
This would have created a deadly radiation fireball burning at over 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit — frying everything within a 600 miles.
Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist who will present a BBC program on the discovery this week, said: “Our blue planet turned gray.
“Long after the hot skies cooled, ash and dust in the atmosphere almost completely blocked out the sun.
“As the lights went out, global temperatures plunged more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit within days.”
Garrod’s team said dinosaurs would have survived the asteroid if it had struck minutes earlier or later — rather than hitting shallow coastal waters.
He added: “An impact in the nearby Atlantic or Pacific Oceans would have meant much less vaporized rock — including the deadly gypsum.
“The cloud would have been less dense and sunlight could still have reached the planet’s surface, meaning what happened next might have been avoided.”
The asteroid’s devastating impact launched rock from the Earth’s crust miles into the air — forming a tower higher than the Himalayas.
It then collapsed to form a strange ring of peaks that still exist today.
Drillers at the crater site also found evidence that the impact caused the biggest tsunami in Earth’s history.
Alice Roberts, who traveled to New Jersey and Patagonia to investigate fossil findings, said: “With the dinosaurs gone, suddenly the landscape was empty of competitors and ripe with possibilities.
“Just half a million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, and landscapes around the globe had filled with mammals of all shapes and sizes.
“Chances are, if it wasn’t for that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here to tell the story today.”