Dinosaurs might have gone up in flames

Smoke and soot after an asteroid strike could have choked dinosaurs to death.

A new theory on the extinction of dinosaurs and other animals at the end of the Cretaceous says that massive amounts of smoke and soot following the Chicxulub asteroid impact led to a devastating domino effect 66 million years ago.

The asteroid, which slammed into Earth at what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, not only immediately burnt some dinosaurs and other animals to a crisp, but also, according to the new study, hit the worst possible spot: an oil-rich area.

"The stratospheric soot was ejected from the oil-rich area by the asteroid impact and was spread globally," Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University told Discovery News.

"The soot aerosols caused sufficiently colder climates at mid–high latitudes and drought with milder cooling at low latitudes on land, in addition to causing limited cessation of photosynthesis in global oceans within a few months to two years after the impact, followed by surface-water cooling in global oceans in a few years."

In short, it was curtains for dinosaurs and many other animals shortly after the asteroid hit.

The scientists found that sediments in both locations for the target time period shared the same composition of combusted organic molecules.

"Therefore, this is the soot from the asteroid crash," Kaiho said.