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.
Of those rare finds we’ve seen things so incredible it’s hard to imagine them to be real at all. In the early world of dinosaurs, the tectonic plates had not yet drifted apart into the modern geography of earth and were united in a single land mass. This largest continent in history was called Pangea and surrounding it was the largest ocean.
On this super continent strapped across the equator grew a mysterious prehistoric tropical jungle. We assume that today’s ecosystems share at least some similarities in respect to the level and diversity of possible life found in a modern rainforest. By those assumptions, it’s safe to say that in the vast prehistoric tropic there was an uncountable number of life forms. More species of life are concentrated in our rainforest than any other place on land and even the largest of today’s wildernesses wouldn’t even be one tenth of what existed 200 million years ago.
So out of this enormous pool of life, mankind has unearthed only 800 creatures spanning about 200 million years of time from 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Scientist spilt this 200 million year gap of time into the periods – the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.
In today’s world, 800 species would only be a fraction of a percent of all life on earth and judging from the environment of ancient times, it is an even slimmer margin. In a nut shell, we know nothing about what really walked the earth during this time; we have a only a dim glimpse. Can you imagine taking 800 random species from our time and trying to define our entire ecosystem?
Yet despite our limited sight, we’ve seen such wondrous and frightening things. Predators measuring fifty feet long stalked the earth and far larger ones swam beneath the seas. Plant eaters larger than a Greyhound bus existed far and wide. Herds of roving herbivores moved over the continent in droves of thousands, like buffalo surging across the Serengeti plain, but easily 20 times larger than the biggest bull.
