The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer

In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself.

The first cave art. The dawn of agriculture. While these are among the most crucial moments in humankind’s beginnings, our most dramatic origin story starts 66 million years ago. It was the apocalyptic instant when a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, terminating the age of dinosaurs and eventually offering a bountiful new world to our mammalian ancestors. For 40 years, scientists have studied the tale of this catastrophic object, known now as the Chicxulub impactor. Today, the impactor represents more than just one bad day on Earth; instead, it has become a kind of Rosetta Stone that can decipher deeper riddles about the origins of life and the future of human civilization, both on our planet and in other worlds across the galaxy. “The Chicxulub impact event completely modified the geologic and biologic evolution of planet Earth,” said David Kring, a planetary geologist who leads the Center for Lunar Science and Exploration in Houston and who was part of the team that announced the discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in 1991. “That is such a big scientific story with popular appeal because it extinguished dinosaurs and cleared the slate, if you will, for mammalian evolution that led to humans, it’s going to captivate both the scientific community and the public for years to come.”