It fell from the sky, but some say there were many. The tolls of destruction rained down upon the earth nearly put an end to all life and stopped 300 million years of evolution dead in its tracks.

The meteor struck with such violence that even today the earth has yet to heal the obvious scars. For a long time, scientists doubted the crater’s mountain range sized rim(s), believing it too extraordinary to be true. It was a colossal end to a colossal time.

We estimate that during this period, about 65.5 million years ago, 66 percent of all life on earth perished, particularly all large animal life. No one knows if the cataclysm sheered life from the globe in a single fiery shock wave or if debris from the explosion clouded the atmosphere for decades, slowly collapsing all of earth’s prehistoric ecosystems.

We know the direct result of that event was the evolutionary slate being wiped clean of the most advanced forms of competing life, among them the Dinosaurs. Their death paved the way for large mammals to slowly rise from the ashes.

Before our phoenix of mammalian life began, it was the time of the reptilian and bird-like leviathans. When I was in grade school (early 90’s), the paleontology world had about 300 or so species of dinosaur discovered,; today there are around 800. About every two weeks, lucky scientists in some geological remote of the world uncover another.