The 24 Hours That Destroyed the Dinosaurs

Sixty-six million years ago, a chunk of space rock the size of Mount Everest slammed into a shallow sea in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The Chicxulub asteroid was traveling at 12 miles per second—ten times faster than a tank shell leaving the barrel—and carried the energy of 10 billion Hiroshima bombs. Within 24 hours, it would end the reign of the dinosaurs and wipe out over 75% of all species on Earth. The episode traces what those first hours were like, minute by minute, for the creatures that had no idea what was coming.

The First Seconds: Fireball and Thermal Hell

The asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere as a blindingly bright new sun, visible to any dinosaur looking up. Within two seconds, it struck. A fireball hotter than the surface of the Sun expanded for hundreds of miles, vaporizing rock and creating superheated plasma. Anything caught inside the dome simply ceased to exist—dinosaurs, forests, mountains, all gone.