Hello and welcome to another Daily Fun Fact From Flora ,

The final instalment of our extinction excitement has come. It’s 66 million years ago. This is the sexy one — the End-Cretaceous Event.

The dinosaurs are dead .

Get ready for a

fuck-off meteor

BOOOOOOOM.

Sorry — what I meant to say is that there is a lot of evidence that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction coincided with an extra-terrestrial impact.

• ahem *

Now this is known as the Chicxulub impact landed in what is now the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. The meteor was thought to have been about 15km wide.

Yes. It was a hefty chonker.

It formed a crater that was over 180km in diameter and is named after the town Chicxulub which is near the centre where the crater landed. To be honest though — with a crater 180km in diameter it should really be called The Whole of Fucking Mexico Impact but apparently no one thought of that.

Now there was another little problem here. Remember the Siberian Traps that poured out all that lava in the last extinction event? Well I have some new ones for you — the Deccan Traps. The impact triggered this igneous province to release a cheeky 1 million km3 of lava.

YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

more lava gifs hehe

The impact also ever so slightly burnt through the oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico which was 100% not ideal.

This event was so intense that it can be seen in sedimentary rocks with the untrained eye. EVERYTHING JUST DIES. These rocks have levels of iridium (usually found in asteroids) that are about 1,000 times higher than lower rock levels.

This helpful man will point out the boundary. It’s really difficult to spot so I"m using him as a visual aid.

Thanks Brian.

The dust cloud created from this impact would have caused many months of near-total darkness. Quite a lot of rocks would have been vapourised upon impact which isn’t so great for the ol" lungs.

We think about 75% of all species went extinct.

Problem. Most plants died because they couldn’t photosynthesise.

BUT luckily ferns that were adapted to live in dark conditions survived!! The pollen records that we have show a fern spike so really ferns were thriving at this point okay maybe not quite thriving but surviving.

In terms of the land animals, apart from a few cold-blooded species like sea turtles and crocodilians (I"ll let you guess what those are), no tetrapods (four limbed things) survived that weighed more than 25kg.

This is another example of the Lilliput Effect we spoke about last time where after an extinction things tend to be quite smoll. The mammals, for example, were all pretty much rat-sized.

The world that followed was colonised by small birds and mammals. Now that all those pesky dinosaurs were gone it opened up LOADS of niches for us mammals to exploit. There were what we like to call adaptive radiations , where organisms rapidly diversify from their ancestral species into new forms.

In terms of fish — things were actually much less bad compared to some other extinctions. Over 90% of bony fish families survived and only 7 out of 41 families of modern sharks, skates and rays disappeared.

Sadly though it was the end of the dinosaurs as we know them. I mean we still have chickens which are basically living dinosaurs Not quite the same though is it.

A few groups of dinosaurs made it that would become modern day reptiles and birds but the vast majority were wiped out. There are some really hilariously awful artistic renditions of this. Please enjoy.

Mmmm so realistic.

Or my personal favourite

Sorry dinosaur — floaty God man says no.

Hope you enjoyed. Stay tuned for more facts.

Lots of love,

Flora xx