Astrum Space - This New Evidence Could Rewrite the Dinosaur Extinction | Astrum Earth

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Think you know what killed the dinosaurs? Think again. Breakthrough evidence is reshaping everything we knew about Earth’s most famous mass extinction, and revealing that the famous asteroid impact might not tell the whole story.▀▀▀▀▀▀Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/ASTRUMEARTH and use code ASTRUMEARTH for 20% off DeleteMe international Plans.▀▀▀▀▀▀A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid slammed into Earth, ending the reign of the dinosaurs. The largest creatures ever to have walked the planet gone, just like that. It's a story we're all familiar with. One asteroid cataclysmic impact results mass extinction. Case closed, right? Well, what have I told you? We've been telling this tale all wrong. New discoveries on the ground, scientific breakthroughs and cutting-edge technology are revolutionising our understanding of the events from that fateful day.

And it turns out there's much more to it than we thought. When the asteroid hit, was Earth already a planet in crisis? Did another catastrophic event add to the terror? Were there any survivors after all? I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrum Earth. Join me today as we travel back in time to investigate what really killed the dinosaurs. We'll take stock of all the evidence to bring you the ultimate guide to their downfall. But be warned, science might not tell you the tale you're used to.

We modern humans have existed for a reasonably long time, around 300,000 years. But on evolutionary timescales, that really is, well, nothing. Dinosaurs walked the Earth for some 180 million years, completely dominating the land for 160 million of them. That's 500 times longer than we've been here. They really did seem unstoppable. Yet, 66 million years ago, somewhere in the darkness of space, an object was on its way that had the power to wipe them out.

We've known the broad outline of this story for decades, but scientists are still piecing together the evidence to work out exactly what happened on that fateful day. And the closer they look, the more complicated the narrative gets. There are holes in the story, clues that simply don't add up, and it's planted seeds of doubt. Could one simple asteroid truly have wiped out the largest beasts ever to warp the earth? If we want to tell a story of ancient earth, the best place to find it is in the ground itself. Every sediment layer acts like a different chapter in the tale. And locked within the rocks of every continent is one page, I mean, quite literally. A thin layer of sediment that marks the boundary between two worlds.

Above the line, a new world begins. Below it is the lost world of the dinosaurs. This mysterious dark grey band of sediment circles the entire globe, a record that's been preserved for millions of years. It's called the Cretaceous Paleo gene boundary, or KPG boundary for short. And was discovered back in 1979 by a father and son geologist duo, Louis and Walter Alvarez, who were just out-collecting rocks in an Italian gorge. What they found inside this layer would change our understanding of Earth's history and of extinction events forever, because the layer was curiously enriched with unusually high levels of iridium, a metal usually vanishingly rare in Earth's crust.

So how did all that aridium get here? Well, that I suspect you already know the answer to. Eridium is very common in meteorites and comets, And the discovery of this layer was the smoking gun linking a giant asteroid to the mass extinction that ended the age of the dinosaurs. And this wasn't just any old asteroid. This one was the size of a city, traveling at 72,000 kilometers per hour, faster than a bullet. It slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The impact unleashed more energy than humanity's entire nuclear arsenal combined.

As you can imagine, that certainly left its mark. Hidden beneath layers of rock and sediment lies a colossal crater nearly 200 kilometres wide and 20 kilometres deep. For 66 million years, it remained buried and forgotten. And then in 1991, geologists searching for oil accidentally stumbled across it. Named the Chixilube crater and nicknamed crater of Doom, it is where, one of the most important geological discoveries ever made. Not because of its size, but because of what it contains. Every stage of this catastrophic asteroid impact left a physical signature in the rock layers.

It's like a time capsule we can peer inside of. Professor Joanna Morgan from Imperial College London and her team have drilled nearly a mile into the inner ring of the crater and reconstructed an extraordinary story. A sequence of events plotted out minutes by minute from the moment of impact. The asteroid and the rocket struck vaporized, causing temperatures to reach 1,200 degrees Celsius. It was so hot, it took 8 million years for the impact site to cool down. The surrounding rock behaved like a liquid, immediately melting into a vast ocean of superheated melt, 70 kilometres across and 3 kilometers deep.

And as the crater collapsed, the crust rebounded like a dropped pebble in water, thrusting up a mountain as tall as Mount Everest in a matter of minutes. As ocean water came rushing in, it boiled instantly, blasting explosive jets of steam and vapor into the sky. Then followed a mega tsunami, 1.5 kilometers high that pummeled into the ship. shores. Within hundreds of kilometers, everything was obliterated. Entire ecosystems ceased to exist in a matter of moments. Now that alone sounds pretty horrendous, doesn't it? But it actually gets worse. You gotta try breakfast at A and W you gotta try bread. And what better way than with a delicious

pre-organic coffee? Starting with just one dollar all day every day now until December 31st. at participating A.N.W. locations in Ontario. More than 3,000 kilometers away in North Dakota, scientists have found chilling evidence of exactly how it impacted Earth's fauna. In 2019, a team of researchers from the University of Kansas uncovered what many considered to be a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, a massive fossil graveyard seemingly frozen in time. It was a scene of intense. Destruction preserved in astonishing detail. Broken and splintered fish fossils wrapped around tree branches strewn in all directions. A turtle skewered by a wooden stake. The leg of a Thescalosaurus dinosaur and the embryo of a flying terosaur inside its egg.

In one layer of sediment all the fish faced to the left. In the next layer they all faced to the right as if they were sloshed back and forth by crashing waves. These animals didn't die over hours, days or even months. They were entombed where they fell, smacked down by shockwaves that race through the continental crust in all directions after the asteroid struck. Their final gasps of life were preserved for millions of years at what's now known as the Tannis fossil site. But hidden inside the fish fossils was an even more remarkable discovery. physical evidence of the meteor itself. When the asteroid hit, particles of molten rock and debris from the impact were ejected into space. So far, they may have even circled the moon.

And as these droplets of molten material cooled in the atmosphere, they crystallized, forming tiny glass particles known as tectites. Then these fell back to Earth, distributed across the entire planet. In 2022, Melanie During from Uppsala University in Sweden found evidence that all this happened within just 15 minutes of the asteroid striking. The glass droplets reigned onto the ancient landscape, lodging inside the gills of fish caught in the catastrophe, as if they'd inhaled the glass whilst still alive. Hot, dense and moving at tremendous speeds, the glass also ignited wildfires. burning everything in their paths to a crisp. But that was just the beginning because the Tannis fossil site still had one more secret to reveal. A team from the University of Manchester analyzed the bones of some of the fossilized sturgeon and paddlefish.

These grow in layers over time, a bit like tree rings, and when food is abundant, fish bones grow faster, creating a larger layer. Using some very cutting edge scanning technology, synchrotron rapid scanning x-ray fluorescence, the team discovered that the fish died in the middle of a growth surge, one that hadn't quite reached its peak. Now, this evidence quite incredibly allowed them to pinpoint the time of year the asteroid hit, namely spring in the northern hemisphere. I mean, it's pretty cool we can pinpoint something so specifically that happened that long ago, but what I've always wondered is why this asteroid in particular was so devastating.

I mean, after all, Earth has been struck by them before, so what was different about this one? Now, you might be thinking it's obviously the asteroid's huge size, which would be fair enough, or even the speed that I mentioned earlier. But what have I told you the fate of the dinosaurs may have been decided by something far more unexpected. A team of scientists from Imperial College London have worked out exactly why this one asteroid was so deadly and it all came down to geometry. More specifically, the angle of impact. By studying the precise shape of the crater and creating advanced 3D simulations,

they found that the asteroid struck Earth at 60 degrees above the horizon, approaching from the north-east. This might sound fairly inconsequential, but it is in fact among the worst possible case scenarios for lethality on impact, because this 60-degree trajectory blasts billions of tons of sulfur-rich rock, CO2 and dust into the upper atmosphere. Had it hit at a shallower angle, much of its energy would have been spread out across the surface. Had it struck head-on, well two to three times less material may have been blasted upwards. Instead, the Chicksilube asteroid hit the planet with a deadly precision which maximized the amount of climate-altering debris that scattered around the

In that instant, a deadly chain of events was set in motion, and Earth entered one of the most extraordinary and until recently unknown chapters in its history. But it turns out it wasn't the impact alone that killed the dinosaurs. As the billions of tons of sulfur and CO2 swirled high above the planet, they formed a global veil almost, blocking out sunlight for 15 years and transforming the chemistry in the sky forever. As sunlight faded, photosynthesis began to fail. Plants withered, food chains that had supported life for millions of years started collapsing from the bottom up. Sulfa aerosols combined with water vapor created acid rain, poisoning ecosystems already reeling from the catastrophe.

Global surface air temperatures plummeted by at least 26 degrees Celsius, triggering sub-zero deadly conditions for the next three to 16 years. Earth had entered a long, dark winter, one that pushed virtually all life on Earth to the brink of survival. For giants like sauropods and apex predators, this became a huge problem. The larger the body, the greater the need for food, territory, and other resources. In a world where these things were dwindling, size became a death sentence. Yet some species endured. Small animals like the purgatory. a squirrel-sized shrew-like mammal hid in the trees, surviving on scraps and adapting to the chaos. Some cold-blooded animals, like reptiles and amphibians, made it by surviving long periods without food,

and avian dinosaurs escaped any immediate local danger by taking to the skies. Beneath the waves, life also found refuge. A groundbreaking 2026 study led by Swansea University, used advanced AI modeling to study the most complete fossil record of sharks and rays spanning the past 145 million years and they discovered that they suffered only a small decline with just 10% of their species disappearing. The ocean's relatively stable temperatures and alternative food sources provided a sanctuary from the catastrophe unfolding above. These hardy survivors inherited a transformed world. The extinction did not unfold in a single day. It played out over months and years and the casualty list was very long. Around 75% of all animals

disappeared. The age of the dinosaurs was well and truly over. So there we have it. The story of how the dinosaurs met their sticky end, done and dussive. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Is how this video would have ended before? But you see, this story is changing. Recently, a study found that the offending meteorite was much drier than first thought, coming from either the far end of the asteroid belt or the outer reaches of our solar system. And the implications of that is that it throws the sulfur and acid ray mechanism into question and instead suggests that it may have been fine particle debris that would have blocked the sun. This is all fairly here or there to be honest with you, but there was another discovery in 2022. A discovery of a discovery

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more secure as we head back to the dinosaurs. When a team of geologists from Harriet's Watt University in Scotland were studying seismic data beneath the Atlantic sea floor just off the coast of Guinea in West Africa, their goal wasn't to investigate the extinction of the dinosaurs. They were searching for sites to drill in order to better understand Earth's past climatic changes. At first there was nothing remarkable in the images being sent back, just the familiar patterns of layered sediment beneath the sea floor. But then, one image showed a faint circular blemish,

the kind of unremarkable feature that many geologists might have dismissed at a glance. But lead scientist Dr. Ushton Nicholson sensed otherwise. His hunch was that this fuzzy blob might be something far more unusual. He suspected it was an impact crater because of the raised rim with layers of debris, extending outwards, but the image was so grainy he couldn't be sure. So the team began to investigate further. Using cutting-edge high-resolution 3D seismic data, what had once looked like a grainy blur suddenly came into sharp focus.

And as the detail emerged, they discovered a crater 9.2 kilometers wide, buried 300 meters under the sea floor. And the culprit, an asteroid around 500 meters wide, which had struck Earth at 72,000 kilometers per hour. It would have looked like a giant fireball 24 times the size of the sun streaking through the sky. What's even more remarkable is that using the detailed 3D scans, the team could reconstruct what happened in the moments after it struck. Within seconds, a vast bowl-shaped crater formed hundreds of meters under the sea floor. Rock behaved like liquids surging back inwards, and earthquakes ripple through the crust,

triggering submarine landslides across thousands of square kilometers. A violent air blast followed, and then shaking equivalent to a magnitude 7 quake. Finally, a series of tsunamis with towering walls of water 800 meters high race across the ocean. But by far the most interesting thing about this meteor is when it hit. The newly identified crater named Nadir sat directly in rock and sediment layers that were of a very similar date to the Chixilube impact. And that's not the only piece of evidence that links these two asteroids together. In 1994, astronomers watched as comet Shoemaker Levy 9 was torn apart by Jupiter's gravity.

before its fragment slammed into the planet in a chain of impacts along a straight line. So what if something similar happened here 66 million years ago? Studies of impact craters on Mars show that when an asteroid breaks apart, the largest fragment typically travels furthest, while smaller fragments strike first, leaving a trail of smaller craters behind. The shape of the Nadir crater reveals the direction from which its asteroid arrived. Remarkably, that trajectory points directly towards Chixilube. Scientists are now faced with an entirely new possibility.

Maybe Earth wasn't struck by a single asteroid, but two. Until scientists carry out further studies on the rocks deep inside than the Deer Crater, they won't know if the two impacts happen days, months or even thousands of years apart. But personally, I think it's pretty cool that there might be some more to this story. and it's not just this potential second doomsday asteroid that's shifting the narrative either. There's evidence that Earth may have already been in trouble before the fateful asteroids appeared in the sky. The classic impact extinction story is being further complicated by a new field of science called disaster microbiology. A study in May 26 in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reports finding evidence of a separate

ecological crisis that began 30,000 to 10,000 years before the Chixilube impact. Microbiologists Rosanna Baker and Arturo Kazada de Val from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed sediment samples from three sites in North America that span the Cretaceous and paleogene periods, the moment around 66 million years ago when the asteroid hit. They found three distinct spikes in fungal. activity in the rock. Two, after the impact as expected, but one, less than 30,000 years before. A clear signal that the world's ecosystems may have already been struggling. We can do this, by the way, because fungi thrive when ecosystems fall apart. As decomposes,

they explode in number when plants and animals die en masse, feeding on what's left behind. The pattern is simple. Life collapses in global fungi blooms. But what makes us even more compelling as that's not the only piece of evidence that shows life on Earth was barely clinging on. More than 15,000 kilometres away from the Mexico impact site lies a vast landscape, a landscape built by immense ancient volcanic eruptions. And the date it formed, yeah, you guessed it, around 66 million years ago. The deck and traps covers an area of 500,000 square kilometers in western India. Today it appears silent. But 66 million years ago, this region was the centre of one of the most powerful volcanic episodes in Earth's history. Volcanic corruptions that lasted a staggering 750,000 years.

Each explosion of magma pump vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, driving long-term global warming. At the same time, sulfur and chlorine gases likely triggered acid rain and short periods of global cooling. The result was a planet in constant environmental flux, with ecosystems being pushed to their limits. And we know exactly when these deadly volcanoes erupted. Scientists from Princeton University are investigating tiny crystals known as Zircon, which are trapped within the ancient volcanic ash layers. Zircon are like nature's time capsules, because when they form, they lock in radioactive uranium, creating an atomic clock that counts down, millions of years. As a result, the team were able to reconstruct the most precise timeline

yet, and what they found was startling. These volcanic eruptions started 250,000 years before the Chicksilube asteroid hit, so the impact may not have been the beginning of the end, but the final blow to an earth already in turmoil. Actually, on reflection, maybe just the one asteroid was kinder than two and all of this death and destruction going on at the same time. But actually the way that Earth responded to this death and destruction, well that doesn't match the traditional story either. Gone is the theory that life spent millions of years recovering from this dark chapter in Earth's history. Actually, it recovered quick. And the evidence for that doesn't come from the Earth itself, no.

Like the asteroids, it came from space. To work out the age of fossils, scientists usually date the sediment layers they're buried in. But during a mass extinction, that method has a fatal flaw, because as vegetation dies, erosion spikes, and huge amounts of material flood into the ocean scrambling the geological sediment clock. So, a team from the University of Texas started to investigate something else, something that was far more stable and accurate, space dust. Microscopic specks that consist of grains of rock, metal, and organic compounds, which originate from asteroids, comets and dying stars.

Every year, around 5,000 tons of space dust rains down through Earth's atmosphere, settling everywhere across oceans, forest, deserts and even our homes. So, yeah, next time you're doing the vacuuming, keep an eye out for some space dust, I guess. Anyway, lead author Chris Lowry and his colleagues use a rare isotope, helium-3, which builds up in deep-sea sediments through this constant rain of space dust. Unlike earthbound signals, this cosmic drizzle falls at a steady rate, providing a natural and constant timekeeper. You gotta try breakfast at A&W. You gotta try bread.

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Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Across six impact sites, they measured helium-3 levels to reconstruct a precise timeline of recovery and what they found was extraordinary. Microscopic plankton, each no bigger than a grain of sand, began evolving just 2,000 years after the mass extinction event. In total, up to 20 new species appeared far earlier than expected. To put that into perspective, if the dinosaurs had got extinct, say, during the Roman Empire, we would already be seeing new species today. Their results published in the Journal of Geology in January 2026 overturned the theory that new species didn't appear until 30,000 years after the asteroid impact. Now what this means is that under the right conditions,

evolution can move remarkably fast and life can bounce back at astonishing speed. And in this particular instance, there was one clear winner that emerged from the darkness, born to digest the dying flesh of its neighbors. Unphased by the dim sun, global impact winter and cooling climate, the fungi kingdom flourished. Yeah, I very sneakly hinted at this earlier when we talked about disaster microbiology, but new evidence from those ancient rocks in Colorado and North Dakota revealed an extraordinary surge in fungal activity. Or to get technical, a major mycological moment. This fungal spike, where fungal remains made up at least 50% of the material found, was seen just just a few thousand years after the asteroids smashed into Earth.

And this fungal uprising wasn't just something that happened in America. It was a global phenomena, because scientists had discovered the same fungal spike in ancient rocks all the way in New Zealand. For a brief period, Earth may have become a fungal world, not one rule by the parasitic zumbifying kind, thankfully, until the plant and animal kingdoms had time to recover and take. over once more. Ultimately, extinction itself is nothing unusual. It's a mechanism of evolution. Over 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. As environments change, some species adapt whilst others disappear. So these catastrophic resets are not just endings, they're openings that clear the way for entirely new forms of life to emerge.

Some scientists even suspect this fungal takeover gave mammals with their warmer, more fungi-resistant body temperatures, a critical advantage over reptiles, allowing them to ultimately go on to dominate the planet. One thing we can be sure of is that I very much doubt we would be here if the dinosaurs had survived. 66 million years on from their fateful demise. The real story of how the dinosaurs came to an end is arguably more disastrous, and to me more exciting, than any film based on a future apocalypse. There were multiple deadly asteroid strikes, huge volcanic eruptions.

We had fungi taking over the world. I mean, normally you just need one of those for a decent film. But really, after all that we've just talked about, I just sort of feel lucky to be here. I mean, without the chain of catastrophic events, mammals would have never risen to dominance. Primates may have never evolved. You and I, my friends, well, we may have never existed. And hey, who knows how long we've got left as a species. Astronomers have mapped nearly all the planet killing asteroids near Earth and none or a collision course for now.

But there's still plenty of other threats. Climate change. Who knows what space might hurt us next week? Dinosaurs didn't disappear because they were weak. They're downfalls because on one spectacularly unlucky day, Earth found itself in the direct path of a colossal asteroid, one which began its journey more than four billion years ago. So let's just hope our luck holds on a little bit longer.

What do you think about this new research? Do you believe there were really two asteroids? Has this changed the way you viewed the end of the dinosaurs? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below, and I'll see you in the next one. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings, the end of jobs, or the end of human struggle.

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