Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs

A collision 160 million years ago of two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter sent many big rock chunks hurtling toward Earth...

A collision 160 million years ago of two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter sent many big rock chunks hurtling toward Earth, including the one that zapped the dinosaurs, scientists said on Wednesday.

Their research offered an explanation for the cause of one of the most momentous events in the history of life on Earth — a six-mile-wide meteorite striking Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.

That catastrophe eliminated the dinosaurs, which had flourished for about 165 million years, and many other life forms, and paved the way for mammals to dominate the Earth and the eventual rise of humankind, many scientists believe.

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The impact is thought to have triggered a worldwide environmental cataclysm, expelling vast quantities of rock and dust into the sky, unleashing giant tsunamis, sparking global wildfires and leaving Earth shrouded in darkness for years.

US and Czech researchers used computer simulations to calculate that there was a 90 percent probability that the collision of two asteroids — one about 105 miles wide and one about 40 miles wide — was the event that precipitated the Earthly disaster.

The collision occurred in the asteroid belt, a collection of big and small rocks orbiting the sun about 100 million miles from Earth, the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.The asteroid Baptistina and rubble associated with it are thought to be leftovers, the scientists said.