Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid struck off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing 75 percent of life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The space rock left a roughly 100-mile-wide crater and destroyed global ecosystems.
Now, a new study shows that it took more than 10 million years of evolution before biodiversity recovered. And the scientists behind the study say their find carries a grave warning for our current era of human-caused extinction, dubbed the Anthropocene. It shows that biodiversity will need millions of years to recover from the damage currently being done.
In the decades since the Chicxulub impact crater was first discovered, many minute details of the event have been studied and debated. Yet the aftermath — and how life recovered — has remained something of a mystery.
Many fossil finds hint life bounced back not long after the cataclysm subsided, which took somewhere ...
