Scientists once suspected that a brutal, years-long winter starved the dinosaurs following an asteroid impact 66 million years ago. New evidence suggests a more violent end: widespread firestorms that may have burned even thick-skinned dinosaurs to a crisp within hours.
The roughly six-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid struck Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, excavating the Chicxulub crater and vaporizing enormous quantities of rock. Some of that material condensed into tiny droplets called spherules, which spread around the planet before falling back through Earth's atmosphere at several miles per second.
As the spherules slowed, their kinetic energy became heat, producing an intense pulse of thermal radiation. Earlier models suggested the effect would have resembled a worldwide broiler that was potentially deadly to exposed, thin-skinned animals, but not powerful enough to ignite vegetation across the globe.
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