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Once upon a time, dinosaurs ruled the world. | 0:00:03 | 0:00:07 | |
But 66 million years ago... | 0:00:07 | 0:00:09 | |
..they vanished, virtually overnight. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:14 | |
So what precisely happened in the minutes, the days, the weeks | 0:00:15 | 0:00:21 | |
that wiped out three-quarters of the animal species on the planet? | 0:00:21 | 0:00:25 | |
Many scientists now believe it was the impact of an asteroid | 0:00:25 | 0:00:30 | |
that caused their extinction. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
But nobody has been able to prove it...until now. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:37 | |
Evolutionary biologist Ben Garrod and I have been granted | 0:00:39 | 0:00:43 | |
exclusive access to a multi-million-pound drilling mission | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
into the exact point where the asteroid hit. | 0:00:46 | 0:00:50 | |
This really is one of the most impressive science laboratories | 0:00:50 | 0:00:53 | |
I've ever seen. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:54 | |
Could the team's findings about the asteroid | 0:00:54 | 0:00:57 | |
finally solve the ultimate dinosaur mystery? | 0:00:57 | 0:01:00 | |
This is an absolutely amazing event - | 0:01:02 | 0:01:05 | |
mountains the size of the Himalayas were formed in seconds. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
With Ben at the impact site, | 0:01:11 | 0:01:13 | |
I will be travelling across the world | 0:01:13 | 0:01:16 | |
to look for evidence of the events that followed. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
That is a bit of fossilised bone, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:23 | |
and they're everywhere, scattered across this hillside. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:25 | |
It's just extraordinary. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
Armed with astonishing new revelations... | 0:01:27 | 0:01:29 | |
Right here, we have the smoking gun, and here, we have the bodies. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:33 | |
..we may finally be able to paint a picture | 0:01:33 | 0:01:37 | |
of the demise of the dinosaurs. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
I'm off the coast of Mexico right now | 0:02:03 | 0:02:05 | |
and this thing you can see behind me | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
is a specially adapted drilling platform. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
Now, there's an international team of scientists on board | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
who are drilling far beneath the seabed where we are now | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
to look for evidence to see why and how the dinosaurs died. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:19 | |
This is the exact spot of a huge asteroid strike | 0:02:21 | 0:02:23 | |
that happened at precisely the same time the dinosaurs were wiped out. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:29 | |
This is Earth, 66 million years ago. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:33 | |
Here's the asteroid. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:35 | |
It's nine miles across - the size of a city. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
And here's the first surprising thing - | 0:02:39 | 0:02:41 | |
the speed of it. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:42 | |
It may not look that fast at this scale, | 0:02:42 | 0:02:45 | |
but it was travelling an unbelievable 40,000 miles an hour. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:50 | |
Seen from the ground, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:54 | |
it would have gone from a mere dot in the sky to impact | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
in a matter of seconds. | 0:02:58 | 0:02:59 | |
The asteroid smashed into a shallow sea | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
north of modern-day Mexico, | 0:03:07 | 0:03:08 | |
exactly where the team is starting to drill. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
The theory goes that this impact set off a chain reaction of events | 0:03:13 | 0:03:18 | |
that killed the dinosaurs. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:20 | |
But here's the heart of the mystery... | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
When you compare the size of the asteroid and the Earth, | 0:03:27 | 0:03:31 | |
well, the asteroid is comparatively small. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:33 | |
It's like a grain of sand hitting a bowling ball. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:37 | |
So how did this asteroid cause a mass extinction | 0:03:37 | 0:03:41 | |
all around the globe? | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
By extracting rock from the impact crater, | 0:03:44 | 0:03:48 | |
the team hopes to find out. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
So, I'm not even strapped in, and I don't especially like heights! | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
But this is great, this is great. | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
This multi-million-pound operation has been decades in the planning | 0:04:02 | 0:04:06 | |
and we're the only film crew to have access. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
Professor Joanna Morgan first proposed the operation. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
It's been a long wait. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:17 | |
I've been excited for, you know, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:19 | |
16 years, so to actually... For it to be happening | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
is quite scary. | 0:04:22 | 0:04:24 | |
We've had so much effort between us to get us to this point | 0:04:24 | 0:04:29 | |
that...that you really want some lovely results. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
Joining her on board to co-direct operations | 0:04:32 | 0:04:35 | |
is Professor Sean Gulick. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:37 | |
So, this is the ultimate test of some ideas, right? | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
We have all these models about how the extinction happened, | 0:04:41 | 0:04:43 | |
but without some samples from ground zero, | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
we can't really test them. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
This really is one of the most impressive science laboratories | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
I've ever seen, and it's an amazing place - | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
we're going to have a quick look around. | 0:04:57 | 0:04:59 | |
This central area here is incredibly important. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
This is known as Main Street by the crew and scientists. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:09 | |
Now, these shipping containers are actually science labs | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
and, in each one... | 0:05:12 | 0:05:14 | |
..is a whole, entire laboratory. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:17 | |
You can see in here huge amounts of equipment. | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
This is one of the scanning labs. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:25 | |
But there are still lots of personal touches. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
You can see where all the different scientists | 0:05:30 | 0:05:32 | |
and the rest of the crew are from. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:33 | |
But my hometown's not on here! | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
But this is the star of the show. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:41 | |
This huge drill will bore through 1.5km of solid rock, | 0:05:42 | 0:05:48 | |
taking us back to the time of the dinosaurs. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
This is the drill bit. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:52 | |
Each one of these little nodules is an industrial diamond. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:56 | |
We've had this one modified with a higher-speed head | 0:05:56 | 0:05:58 | |
that allows us to core. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
Literally collecting a column of rock three metres at a time | 0:06:02 | 0:06:06 | |
and, as we go further down the borehole, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
we go further back in time, | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
until we actually get to the moment of the impact, | 0:06:11 | 0:06:13 | |
about 66 million years ago. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:15 | |
As Ben joins the team drilling down into the rock | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
for evidence of the asteroid's effects, | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
I'm travelling the world to look for clues from fossils. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:26 | |
My first stop, 1,700 miles from the crater, | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
is New Jersey. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:34 | |
I'm here to see a mass prehistoric graveyard | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
unlike anything that's been unearthed before. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
This disused quarry | 0:06:43 | 0:06:44 | |
may be one of the most important palaeontological sites in the world. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:49 | |
I'm here to view an intriguing discovery | 0:06:49 | 0:06:52 | |
that may directly link the mass extinction | 0:06:52 | 0:06:55 | |
to the asteroid impact. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
There's something very strange about this mass extinction. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:02 | |
So many animals died on that day, and yet, it's virtually impossible | 0:07:02 | 0:07:07 | |
to find casualties of this devastating event. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:11 | |
But palaeontologists here in New Jersey | 0:07:11 | 0:07:14 | |
think they might have found just that - | 0:07:14 | 0:07:17 | |
evidence of the day the dinosaurs died. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
It's such an extraordinary claim, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:23 | |
I want to see exactly what they've discovered. | 0:07:23 | 0:07:27 | |
'I've arranged to meet palaeontologist Kenneth Lacovara, | 0:07:30 | 0:07:34 | |
'one of the most experienced - | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
'and luckiest - fossil hunters in the world. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
'He's going to show me where the discovery was made, | 0:07:39 | 0:07:42 | |
'in what used to be the seabed.' | 0:07:42 | 0:07:44 | |
We're going back through time. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:45 | |
We are. Now, if you take one more step, Alice, | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
you will be in the Cretaceous. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:50 | |
Excellent. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:51 | |
'As we descend into the quarry, we arrive at layers of sediment | 0:07:51 | 0:07:55 | |
'that were deposited during the Cretaceous period, | 0:07:55 | 0:07:58 | |
'when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.' | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
So, down here, we're in the Cretaceous period. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:03 | |
Here, we're in the Palaeogene period, after the Cretaceous. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:08 | |
'The boundary between the two periods marks the moment | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
'that the dinosaurs went extinct, 66 million years ago.' | 0:08:11 | 0:08:15 | |
So, this is the boundary right here. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
No-one in the world has found an in-place dinosaur fossil | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
one centimetre above that line. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:24 | |
The team uncovered a dense layer of fossils right at this boundary line. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:33 | |
It's potentially a unique discovery. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
Dinosaurs. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:38 | |
No dinosaurs. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:39 | |
Gosh, that's extraordinary. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
'The animals found here are typical of the late Cretaceous.' | 0:08:42 | 0:08:48 | |
-That's a formidable-looking tooth. -It is, isn't it? -Yeah. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:52 | |
What's that from? | 0:08:52 | 0:08:53 | |
This is from a mosasaur. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:56 | |
Mosasaur's a giant marine reptile, an apex predator. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
Think of a Komodo dragon that's as long as a bus, | 0:09:02 | 0:09:04 | |
with paddles for limbs, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
a two-metre jaw packed full of these teeth. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:09 | |
We find mosasaurs here below our bone bed and in the bone bed. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:14 | |
We never find mosasaurs above the bone bed | 0:09:14 | 0:09:17 | |
because they go extinct along with the dinosaurs. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:19 | |
Ken believes that the mosasaurs he's found here | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
may be some of the last that ever lived... | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
..and that they died as part of the great extinction event. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
To understand why, | 0:09:34 | 0:09:36 | |
we have to look at the other fossils that Ken has found in the quarry. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:40 | |
-This is incredible, Ken! -HE LAUGHS | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
Look at all those fossils. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:51 | |
-25,000 of them. -SHE GASPS | 0:09:51 | 0:09:53 | |
The way you've laid them out in this grid, is this as you found them? | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
These are the places in which we've found them, yep. | 0:09:57 | 0:09:59 | |
-170 square metres of them. -SHE GASPS | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
It's an astonishing amount of work. | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
All these fossils occur in a layer | 0:10:05 | 0:10:07 | |
that's no more than ten centimetres thick. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
'For Ken, the first clue that these animals all died | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
'in a single catastrophic event | 0:10:13 | 0:10:15 | |
'is that the skeletons are largely intact with no teeth marks on them.' | 0:10:15 | 0:10:20 | |
They weren't transported, they weren't scavenged, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
they died suddenly and they were buried quickly. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
That tells us that this is a moment in geological time | 0:10:25 | 0:10:29 | |
that's days, weeks, maybe months, but this is not thousands of years, | 0:10:29 | 0:10:33 | |
this is not hundreds of thousands of years. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
This is, essentially, an instantaneous event. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
'A second clue comes from the surprising mix of species | 0:10:39 | 0:10:44 | |
'that had lived in many different environments.' | 0:10:44 | 0:10:47 | |
I mean, I can pick out large vertebrates. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
Sure. We see the occasional bird here. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:53 | |
There's a tibia from a crocodile. | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
And that's laying next to a piece of the outer shell | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
of a huge sea turtle, | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
something that would be maybe a metre-and-a-half across. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
'And just a few feet away, | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
'Ken found another turtle from a different part of the ocean.' | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
This is a coastal-living turtle. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
You can see how tightly articulated it is. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
The shell doesn't flex, so we know that this turtle | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
didn't dive deeply in the ocean. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
This animal was living around the coast, in the shallow water. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
So, what do you think you've got here? | 0:11:24 | 0:11:26 | |
All this stuff died suddenly, | 0:11:26 | 0:11:28 | |
and was buried all at about the same time, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:30 | |
so that means all the stuff that comes in from the coast | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
has to come in suddenly. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
And that tells us that there is an environmental disturbance going on | 0:11:34 | 0:11:39 | |
on the coastline, upshore from here. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
Whatever was the cause, | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
this calamity that wiped out these animals, | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
it was happening in the deep water, | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
it was happening along the coastline, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:50 | |
and it's happening on land. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:51 | |
Ken's theory is controversial, but if he's right, | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
this could be the first fossil evidence | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
of a sudden mass death event at the end of the Cretaceous... | 0:12:03 | 0:12:08 | |
..right at that point in time when 75% of life on Earth is wiped out. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:18 | |
But what caused this mass death event? | 0:12:20 | 0:12:24 | |
Could all these animals have been killed by the impact of an asteroid | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
1,700 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico? | 0:12:27 | 0:12:32 | |
Ben is with the scientists who have been drilling into the seabed | 0:12:32 | 0:12:36 | |
above the asteroid crater. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
I'm here, right in the middle of the drilling platform, | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
and there's a fresh core about to come out. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
We've already drilled through 500 metres of limestone sediment. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:50 | |
Now, we're going to start to bring up rock core | 0:12:51 | 0:12:54 | |
for the scientists to examine as we get closer to the impact crater. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:59 | |
This is the first full core of the expedition, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:01 | |
we're excited to say. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:03 | |
The first full, three-metre-long core, | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
some light layers. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:07 | |
We're wondering if they're ashes or something. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
We're pretty excited. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:11 | |
This, along with other core samples like it, | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
can tell the team so much information | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
about what was going on at the time of the impact. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:18 | |
The first thing the team does with each new core | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
is find out how old the rock is. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:25 | |
Exactly what's living, exactly what fossils we find | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
tell us what age we are. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:32 | |
As soon as the core comes up on deck, | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
we are given a small crumb of material, | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
we take it back to the lab and give an age call | 0:13:37 | 0:13:41 | |
within five minutes of the core appearing on the deck. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
I just got some sweet pictures. Look at this crystal - | 0:13:47 | 0:13:49 | |
this is the same stuff from the core catcher under the microscope. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
Look at these crystals. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:53 | |
Though it contains valuable information, | 0:13:55 | 0:13:58 | |
this core isn't from the impact crater itself. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:01 | |
Instead, it's from the layers of sediment above it. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:05 | |
The team needs to drill a further 130 metres down into the sediment | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
to get to the crater itself. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:11 | |
The further down they go, the harder the rock is, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
so that means weeks of 24-hours-a-day drilling. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:20 | |
They want to pull core from an area of the inner crater | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
called the peak ring, | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
found only in the largest of super craters. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
They're formed when the massive impact of an asteroid | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
forces rock to erupt in a central uprising, | 0:14:38 | 0:14:42 | |
which then collapses outwards to form the distinctive peak ring. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:46 | |
It's these rocks that contain the clues to what happened | 0:14:47 | 0:14:51 | |
in the moments after impact. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:53 | |
It's been three weeks since the team started drilling into the seabed | 0:14:59 | 0:15:04 | |
and time and money are running short. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:06 | |
We didn't sample that because it's in the middle of a core. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
The drill is nearly through the hundreds of metres of limestone | 0:15:09 | 0:15:13 | |
that has built up since the asteroid struck, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
approaching rock layers from the day of impact. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
I mean, look at this on the microscope. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:21 | |
I would say somewhere between about 64.5 million years ago | 0:15:21 | 0:15:27 | |
and 63.5. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:31 | |
Wow. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:32 | |
-Wow, so this was E4... -Yup. -..which is 53 million. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
Now we are 63, so we have 10 million. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:39 | |
Yeah, that sounds like a good estimate, | 0:15:39 | 0:15:41 | |
-so 10 million years in three metres. -In three metres. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
We've been stuck in the same zone for a while, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:46 | |
going forward very slowly, and then all of a sudden... | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
-HE CLICKS HIS FINGERS -..boom, big jump in time. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:51 | |
The team are noticing clues in the latest cores - | 0:15:51 | 0:15:55 | |
something extraordinary. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:56 | |
But as you go down, it's just more and more and more of it. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:02 | |
It's got this greenish tint. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:04 | |
Yeah, there's one right there. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
We've now had four cores of ever-coarsening sands. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:12 | |
I think the only process on Earth that can do that is a tsunami. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:15 | |
Tsunamis are huge, turbulent waves that rip material from the seabed. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
When the wave passes, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:24 | |
the material is deposited back on the ocean floor in size order. | 0:16:24 | 0:16:30 | |
The heaviest, most coarse sand settles first, | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
the finer sand on top. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
The thicker the deposit, the bigger the tsunami. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:39 | |
And the fact it's already, like, 12 metres thick | 0:16:43 | 0:16:46 | |
probably already makes it one of the largest, | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
maybe the largest tsunami deposit ever discovered. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:50 | |
And if it keeps getting thicker as we go, it will absolutely, | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
unquestionably, be the largest tsunami deposit ever discovered. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:57 | |
And, of course, it's right here in ground zero of the impact. | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
It's the first major clue of how the impact of this asteroid | 0:17:00 | 0:17:05 | |
could have caused a deadly chain of events, | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
starting with the biggest tsunami in history. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
1,700 miles away in New Jersey, | 0:17:13 | 0:17:16 | |
Ken Lacovara has also picked up evidence | 0:17:16 | 0:17:18 | |
of what could have been a tsunami. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
After that asteroid hit, it's just chaos on the continent. | 0:17:23 | 0:17:27 | |
There are tsunami waves lapping up against the continent. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:30 | |
You're going to have trees floating down the estuaries. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:33 | |
You're going to have sediment choking the rivers. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
And that's exactly what we see there. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
Here in our fossil bed, we get a mixture of marine organisms | 0:17:38 | 0:17:41 | |
and organisms that came in from the land. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
One of our more common fossils is wood. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
In the Gulf of Mexico, the crew are on the verge | 0:17:50 | 0:17:52 | |
of breaking into the asteroid impact crater, | 0:17:52 | 0:17:55 | |
but, at the worst possible moment, they've hit a roadblock. | 0:17:55 | 0:17:59 | |
So they just woke me up because there's | 0:18:01 | 0:18:02 | |
a problem with the drilling. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:04 | |
We don't know if it's snapped or if it just got stuck a little bit. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
We don't know, but they have to bring it back | 0:18:07 | 0:18:09 | |
to the surface to take a look. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:11 | |
As they get nearer the crater, | 0:18:11 | 0:18:13 | |
the rock is getting tougher to penetrate, | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
and that's causing problems with the drill. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
TOOL BUZZES | 0:18:18 | 0:18:19 | |
Getting to the point where you start pushing the drill | 0:18:19 | 0:18:21 | |
beyond its capacity, and right now, there's no... | 0:18:21 | 0:18:24 | |
There's no drilling rods, no bit, no anything in the hole. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
While the engineers fix the rig, | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
the scientists lose valuable drilling time. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
Behind me, you'll notice the rig is not moving. | 0:18:36 | 0:18:39 | |
SPARKS CRACKLE | 0:18:39 | 0:18:41 | |
The pump that allows it to turn is actually broken. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:44 | |
RUMBLING | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
We're in a bit of a race against time now. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
We're going to struggle to get to 1,500 metres. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:56 | |
So we're all hopeful - | 0:18:58 | 0:19:00 | |
fingers, toes and so on are crossed - | 0:19:00 | 0:19:02 | |
and we'll see how this goes. | 0:19:02 | 0:19:04 | |
Finally, after a month of drilling, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
the team are pulling rock from the asteroid crater itself. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:14 | |
Already, they're seeing evidence of the incredible heat | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
generated by the impact - | 0:19:19 | 0:19:21 | |
rock that has melted. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
And look at... | 0:19:23 | 0:19:24 | |
In this part, it is very clear that we have different kinds of colours, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
like this red colour. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:29 | |
It goes from green to red... | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
-I think it's melting the material. -Melted... -Yeah. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:34 | |
-What about this? -I think that is a big cluster melt. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
That does, too. Look at that. That looks like the suevite. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
And we are now fully into impact rocks directly, | 0:19:39 | 0:19:41 | |
and it's really easy to see, because it's granite, | 0:19:41 | 0:19:45 | |
and so you can see these spotted, leopard-looking big chunks. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:51 | |
So, in effect, you know, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:52 | |
these were formed, you know, on the days that the dinos died. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
Quite heavy, these, aren't they? | 0:19:58 | 0:20:00 | |
Yeah, you really appreciate just...just how solid this rock is. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
How deep have you gone with this so far? | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
We've got to just 1,330 metres, about that. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
So, we were hoping to get 1,500 metres, | 0:20:09 | 0:20:11 | |
but we've got 700 metres of peak ring materials, | 0:20:11 | 0:20:14 | |
so we're pretty happy. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:16 | |
Why couldn't you get 1,500? | 0:20:16 | 0:20:18 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:20:18 | 0:20:19 | |
Cos...cos the budget ran out. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:21 | |
Oh, no! | 0:20:21 | 0:20:22 | |
I'm dying to ask the question that I wanted to know as a kid - | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
where's the asteroid? | 0:20:25 | 0:20:26 | |
-Yes, a lot of people think I'm going to find the asteroid... -Yeah. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:30 | |
..and ask me that question a lot. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:31 | |
Something like 95 or more percent of the asteroid is vaporised. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:35 | |
-Mm-hm. -So, in fact, there's hardly any asteroid here | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
beneath the surface. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:41 | |
The asteroid material has been, sort of, | 0:20:41 | 0:20:43 | |
spread all around the globe, | 0:20:43 | 0:20:44 | |
so it's been ejected way above the Earth's atmosphere, | 0:20:44 | 0:20:48 | |
travelled round the globe, and landed around the Earth. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:51 | |
After eight weeks, the work here is done. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
I don't think it could have gone much better. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:00 | |
I'll not forget this place. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:03 | |
It's been an amazing expedition, and I expect we'll have lots more | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
discoveries to come. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:08 | |
More than 300 rock cores have been extracted, | 0:21:08 | 0:21:10 | |
which the team hopes will tell the story of how the dinosaurs died. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:15 | |
Four months and over 5,000 miles later, | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
the rock cores are now here | 0:21:37 | 0:21:39 | |
at the University of Bremen in Germany, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
for the second phase | 0:21:42 | 0:21:43 | |
of this colossal and unparalleled scientific journey. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:47 | |
I'm inside a huge fridge that's now home to all the samples that | 0:21:47 | 0:21:51 | |
were taken up from the Gulf of Mexico, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
and it's really cold in here, as you might expect. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
Now, this is to stop any organisms from growing | 0:21:57 | 0:22:00 | |
and contaminating these samples. | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
This is a test recording. Say something. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
Oh. Hello, hello. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:11 | |
Here in Bremen, the research team is working to find out what happened, | 0:22:11 | 0:22:15 | |
minute by minute, after the asteroid struck, | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
and what that meant for the dinosaurs. | 0:22:18 | 0:22:20 | |
OK, this is day two that we've had the samples, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
and I'm going to take you through the...around the labs | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
where everybody's started their analyses. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:32 | |
Over here we can see people looking through microscopes, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
looking at thin slides that have been collected from offshore. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
Hi, Philippe. I'm going to film you while you take a look at this core. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
Hey! | 0:22:41 | 0:22:43 | |
Unravelling these cores is a mammoth task. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:50 | |
Over 800 metres of rock has to be carefully split, | 0:22:50 | 0:22:55 | |
tested and photographed. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:56 | |
But what they're starting to reveal about the force of the impact | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
is literally earth-shattering. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
This core, from above the crater, is what typical geology looks like - | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
layer upon layer of similar-looking rock, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
laid down on the seabed very slowly. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
This three metres of limestone took millions of years to accumulate. | 0:23:21 | 0:23:26 | |
But when the asteroid struck... | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
..it was geology at hyperspeed. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:34 | |
The next 600 metres of rock were deposited in a single day, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:43 | |
leaving a unique and chaotic jumble. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
Sean, I mean, how do you make sense of this incredible place | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
-that you've got here? -It is amazing. | 0:23:56 | 0:23:57 | |
This is 150km worth of core, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
collected by the International Ocean Discovery Programme | 0:24:00 | 0:24:02 | |
-and all its predecessors back to the late '60s. -Mm-hm. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
But from all these cores, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 | |
-the most amazing is the one we just collected... -Yeah. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:08 | |
-..in the Chicxulub impact crater. -Of course, yeah. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
You can see this black, flowing texture of the rock. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:14 | |
This is actually... | 0:24:14 | 0:24:15 | |
-It looks like it flowed, right? -Mm. -You can see the textures in it. | 0:24:15 | 0:24:18 | |
This is actually melted basement rock, | 0:24:18 | 0:24:20 | |
melted granite, and it actually takes amazing pressures to do that, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:24 | |
and amazing pressures to melt the rock. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:26 | |
This is... | 0:24:26 | 0:24:27 | |
So I've got a piece of what would be considered, sort of, | 0:24:27 | 0:24:29 | |
normal granite, if you will - | 0:24:29 | 0:24:31 | |
the kind that you might put on your countertop, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
and that's why we use it, cos it's nice and hard. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
-I mean, it... Right? -Pretty solid. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:38 | |
But this... Yeah, exactly. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:39 | |
This stuff has actually seen shock of an incredible level, | 0:24:39 | 0:24:44 | |
so think of it as pressure waves moving down through the granite, | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
like lots and lots of little earthquakes. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
And what it's done to it is, | 0:24:50 | 0:24:51 | |
all the way down at the scale of a crystal, | 0:24:51 | 0:24:53 | |
-is it's actually deformed it... -Mm-hmm. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:55 | |
..so that the final granite... | 0:24:55 | 0:24:56 | |
..can be broken. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:00 | |
-It just crumbled up. That's...that's amazing. -Yeah. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:02 | |
Oh, wow. Just such incredible, amazing forces at work here. | 0:25:02 | 0:25:07 | |
This whole event, it's... I'm still finding it difficult. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
Well, even as a geophysicist, where we study this for a living, | 0:25:10 | 0:25:13 | |
it's really hard to wrap our brains around the enormity of | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
the pressures involved, and the enormity of the destruction | 0:25:16 | 0:25:18 | |
-that happens in the middle of an impact, and so quickly. -Mm-hm. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
This all happened in less than ten minutes. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
It's becoming clear just how mind-bogglingly huge | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
the Yucatan impact really was. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
And to help grasp its scale, | 0:25:33 | 0:25:35 | |
Sean is taking a trip to a more recent impact site in Arizona. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:40 | |
This simple crater here was created by about a 50-metre, or 150-foot, | 0:25:48 | 0:25:53 | |
asteroid impacting the Earth, about 50,000 years ago. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
It's about a mile across. It's actually quite small. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
It's basically, simply, a bowl-shaped crater. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
Everything above the red line that you see there is actually | 0:26:03 | 0:26:05 | |
material that used to be buried that has been flipped up on end, | 0:26:05 | 0:26:09 | |
and is now...or flipped upside-down, | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
and is now laying as a pile of broken-up material. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
By studying the shape of the crater and the upheaval of the rock layers, | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
Sean, Jo and the team can compare this site to | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
the Yucatan impact zone, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
Even a small asteroid strike like this | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
would have had dramatic consequences. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
So it comes in at something like 26,000mph. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:35 | |
10km away from here, we would have a fireball reaching, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
maybe 20km away from here, a shock wave, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
and, say, 40km away from here are hurricane-force winds, | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
but that would just have been a bad day | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
in, today, northern Arizona. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:49 | |
So this is what a 50m-wide asteroid can do - | 0:26:52 | 0:26:55 | |
it's devastating, but localised. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:58 | |
but what about an asteroid that is nine miles across | 0:26:58 | 0:27:01 | |
and leaves a crater 120 miles wide? | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
To understand the effects of that impact, | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
the team needs to know exactly how much energy it released. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
To do that, they're comparing rock samples from Yucatan | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
to data gathered from some of the largest ever man-made explosions. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:27 | |
This is the Nevada Test Site, | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
the most bombed place in the world. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
The US military have detonated 904 atomic bombs here. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:48 | |
To help us understand how atomic bombs connect to asteroids, | 0:27:48 | 0:27:52 | |
we've enlisted the help | 0:27:52 | 0:27:53 | |
of physicists Mark Boslough and David Dearborn. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
The blast must have come all the way through, | 0:27:58 | 0:28:00 | |
and I bet these windows blew out. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:02 | |
Those shards of glass would be accelerated by 90mph wind. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:05 | |
-Wind, the windows were gone. Yes. -And they're totally...boom. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:09 | |
This house was part of a test village called Survival Town, | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
built to study the effects of a nuclear blast. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:15 | |
It actually survived a blast called Apple-2 in May 1965. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:22 | |
EXPLOSION | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
WIND HOWLS | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
Most of the damage is done by the fireball... | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
..and the heat that is generated, or the blast wave as it goes by... | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
..and the houses that were in closer didn't survive. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:43 | |
Those of us who work on asteroid impacts, | 0:28:52 | 0:28:54 | |
we naturally started comparing them to nuclear explosions. | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
It's a similar phenomenon. | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
The experimenters had high-speed cameras, | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
they had gauges that measured the intensity of the shock wave, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
the blast wave in the air. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:08 | |
The tests found that nuclear explosions are devastating | 0:29:09 | 0:29:12 | |
even at a microscopic level, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
causing catastrophic shock to minerals such as quartz. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
The pressure is so high in a shock wave from a nuclear explosion | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
that it actually exceeds the strength of a crystal. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:29 | |
Crystal is made up of a uniform array of atoms | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
and that uniformity is completely disrupted by a strong shock wave, | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
and that's what shocked quartz is. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
In Bremen, Professor Joanna Morgan is looking at quartz | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
found in rock cores from the asteroid impact site. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
From nuclear test data, she knows exactly how much force | 0:29:48 | 0:29:52 | |
it takes to shock quartz. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:55 | |
From this, she can tell how much force the Yucatan rock | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
has been subjected to and begin to calculate the exact amount of | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
energy released when the asteroid struck. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
So this is a piece of shocked quartz that we recently drilled | 0:30:04 | 0:30:09 | |
from the Chicxulub impact crater. | 0:30:09 | 0:30:10 | |
There's lots of lines here. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:12 | |
Essentially, the more lines we have on the screen, | 0:30:12 | 0:30:15 | |
different directions, the more shocked this rock has been. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
These are caused by the impact, | 0:30:18 | 0:30:20 | |
by the shock wave that travels through this piece of quartz. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:22 | |
So we used exactly the same hydrocodes, they're called, | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
to model nuclear explosions as we do to model the impact craters. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:30 | |
We've actually stolen these codes and applied them to our simulations | 0:30:30 | 0:30:34 | |
of impact crater formation. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:35 | |
What sort of force were we actually talking about | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
from the asteroid hitting it? | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
This event was equivalent to about 10 billion Hiroshimas, | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
so, absolutely enormous. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
The most dramatic event in the last 100 million years. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:48 | |
10 billion Hiroshimas combined? | 0:30:48 | 0:30:50 | |
-That's the amount of force going into this? -Absolutely. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:52 | |
It's incredible, it really is. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:53 | |
Finally, we have hard evidence | 0:30:59 | 0:31:01 | |
of just how powerful the asteroid strike really was. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:06 | |
10 billion Hiroshimas. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:08 | |
It's a major revelation. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
But the truly incredible thing about this asteroid strike | 0:31:12 | 0:31:15 | |
was that it changed the face of our planet within seconds. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
And now we know that, | 0:31:18 | 0:31:21 | |
we can do something that has never been done before. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
'Create a simulation of exactly how the impact affected Earth | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
'and the dinosaurs.' | 0:31:29 | 0:31:31 | |
Here's what the new results tell us about those crucial initial minutes | 0:31:32 | 0:31:36 | |
after the asteroid struck. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:38 | |
The asteroid, nine miles wide, | 0:31:41 | 0:31:44 | |
smashes into the Yucatan at 40,000mph... | 0:31:44 | 0:31:48 | |
..vaporising instantly. | 0:31:57 | 0:31:59 | |
The impact makes a hole in the earth 20 miles deep and 120 miles across, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:08 | |
turning the surrounding sea to steam and shattering the earth below. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:13 | |
Rock from deep in the Earth's crust then rises miles into the air, | 0:32:14 | 0:32:19 | |
forming a tower higher than the Himalayas | 0:32:19 | 0:32:23 | |
that collapses to form a strange ring of peaks that exists today. | 0:32:23 | 0:32:28 | |
All this in the first ten minutes. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:33 | |
What did this mean for the dinosaurs? | 0:32:35 | 0:32:37 | |
Well, it started an unstoppable and devastating chain of events. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:42 | |
First, like an enormous nuclear explosion, | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
a radiation fireball 10,000 degrees centigrade | 0:32:47 | 0:32:51 | |
spreads out from the impact zone. | 0:32:51 | 0:32:54 | |
This searing hot sphere fries everything within | 0:32:56 | 0:33:00 | |
a 600-mile radius in an instant. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
The truly global devastation had its roots not in the blast, | 0:33:05 | 0:33:10 | |
but in the huge vapour plume | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
that rose out of the crater and through the atmosphere. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
A red-hot cloud of vaporised asteroid and rock, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:24 | |
expanding upwards 600 miles, | 0:33:24 | 0:33:27 | |
spreading rapidly outwards to fill the planet's atmosphere. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
Back then, faraway New Jersey was covered in ocean. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
And it too would soon feel the effects of the impact. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:50 | |
1,700 miles from the site of the impact, | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
the fireball wouldn't have been visible. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
That blazing, towering, swirling cloud | 0:33:58 | 0:34:01 | |
would've been just over the horizon, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
but we might have seen a faint glow. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
The animals here were safe from the direct radiation. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:10 | |
Two-and-a-half hours later, | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
like the sound of heavy traffic in the distance, | 0:34:15 | 0:34:17 | |
the shock wave, now a sound wave, arrived. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:21 | |
Wind starts to whip up, growing stronger and stronger until | 0:34:25 | 0:34:29 | |
we're facing into hurricane-force winds. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
The blast wave from the impact | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
surged across the Earth at enormous speed. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:42 | |
Its effects would have been short-lived, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
but those few traumatic hours | 0:34:47 | 0:34:50 | |
left an indelible impression in the earth's geological record. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:54 | |
These are beads of molten rock that rained down from the skies | 0:34:57 | 0:35:02 | |
and as they cool, they become glass. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:04 | |
And if you melt rock and you cool it fast, | 0:35:04 | 0:35:06 | |
it doesn't have a chance to turn back into rock, it forms glass. | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
Glass called spherules. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:11 | |
And we find these little spherules right here | 0:35:11 | 0:35:14 | |
in this mass death assemblage. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:16 | |
What produces the kind of energy and heat needed | 0:35:19 | 0:35:23 | |
to form these spherules, then? | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
Well, when you have an asteroid impact, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:28 | |
it melts the rock and it flies up through the atmosphere | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
and these bits of molten rock rain down on the planet. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
'These 66-million-year-old droplets of molten rock show that | 0:35:34 | 0:35:39 | |
'debris was falling on landscapes | 0:35:39 | 0:35:40 | |
'far away from the impact zone itself.' | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
Protected by the water, marine creatures like the mosasaurs | 0:35:43 | 0:35:48 | |
may have been able to survive these immediate events. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:51 | |
But for the dinosaurs on land, with nowhere to hide, | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
this was the beginning of the end. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
To show how the effects might have played out | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
for dinosaurs on the ground, | 0:36:02 | 0:36:03 | |
we've enlisted palaeontologists Steve Brusatte and Tom Williamson | 0:36:03 | 0:36:08 | |
to our international team. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:09 | |
They've come to New Mexico, | 0:36:09 | 0:36:12 | |
1,200 miles from the impact zone, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:15 | |
hunting for remains in one of the richest dinosaur fossil sites | 0:36:15 | 0:36:19 | |
in the world. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:20 | |
-Yeah. OK. -Whoa. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
-Got a bone layer. -Look at this. Check this out. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:25 | |
A lot of times, we'll just be walking around in the Badlands, | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
looking for stuff that's sticking out of the rock. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
That's always the first clue. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:34 | |
This one's really sticking out. We can tell from the shape of it | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
that it's part of the backbone of a dinosaur. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
It's a bone from the backbone of a horned dinosaur. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:45 | |
This is probably Pentaceratops, | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
which means five-horned face, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:50 | |
two brow horns, a nasal horn and then a cheek horn on each side. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:54 | |
Triceratops has three horns on its face. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
This guy had two more horns, so five horns total, | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
so an even gaudier dinosaur. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
The ceratopsians, like Pentaceratops and Triceratops, | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
were a large group of plant-eating dinosaurs | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
that roamed the American landscape | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
for the 20 million years leading up to the asteroid impact. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:17 | |
-There it is. -Pretty good. Look at that. -Not bad. | 0:37:21 | 0:37:24 | |
This whole area here, | 0:37:25 | 0:37:26 | |
honestly, it's littered with these kind of bones. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:29 | |
These were the cows of the Cretaceous, | 0:37:29 | 0:37:31 | |
they would've been everywhere on this landscape. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:33 | |
66 million years ago, this area would've looked very different. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:38 | |
Today, it's known as the San Juan Badlands. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
Back then, it wasn't so bad at all. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
This whole area was a lush jungle. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
Dense vegetation. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:53 | |
Thick forests cut through by flowing rivers. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:58 | |
When that day started, this whole area here would've been teeming | 0:38:04 | 0:38:09 | |
with dinosaurs, and then, about 2,000km or so, | 0:38:09 | 0:38:15 | |
1,200 miles in this direction to the south-east, the asteroid hit. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:19 | |
And very quickly, the dinosaurs would've realised | 0:38:29 | 0:38:32 | |
that something was wrong, | 0:38:32 | 0:38:34 | |
because there would've been an enormous red glowing cloud | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
that would've filled up much of the sky here. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:41 | |
The glowing cloud would've looked dramatic, | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
but this far from the impact zone, | 0:38:45 | 0:38:47 | |
the dinosaurs here would've been safe...for now. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
Now, their cousins down in Texas, | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
about 1,000 kilometres closer to the impact site, | 0:38:54 | 0:38:58 | |
they were toast. | 0:38:58 | 0:38:59 | |
They were incinerated, they were vaporised. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:01 | |
By studying the Yucatan rock core, | 0:39:01 | 0:39:04 | |
we know the exact timing of what happened next. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:06 | |
11 minutes after the impact, | 0:39:08 | 0:39:10 | |
the vapour cloud arrived in New Mexico. | 0:39:10 | 0:39:14 | |
The skies darkened and the temperature started to rise. | 0:39:14 | 0:39:19 | |
It wasn't really a case of fire and brimstone | 0:39:23 | 0:39:26 | |
raining down from the heavens. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:27 | |
It was more a case of all of that stuff heating up the atmosphere | 0:39:27 | 0:39:31 | |
and turning the atmosphere into a giant radiator. | 0:39:31 | 0:39:35 | |
The heat was so intense that, | 0:39:40 | 0:39:42 | |
over 1,000 miles away from the impact, | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
many animals would have been roasted alive. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
Climate specialist Dr Brian Toon | 0:39:50 | 0:39:52 | |
is the first scientist ever to theorise what happened next. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
A devastating global firestorm he's studied for more than 20 years. | 0:39:56 | 0:40:03 | |
It wasn't falling on you, it was 60km above the ground or so, | 0:40:03 | 0:40:08 | |
and the glowing hot lava was emitting an amount of energy | 0:40:08 | 0:40:13 | |
that's a few times larger than the sun. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
This is not a normal fire. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
The fire was started everywhere, which causes what's called | 0:40:20 | 0:40:23 | |
a mass fire. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
Mass fires can be much hotter than a normal fire. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
Well, the leaves on the ground caught fire, | 0:40:31 | 0:40:34 | |
leaves in the trees caught fire... | 0:40:34 | 0:40:36 | |
The underbrush caught fire. | 0:40:38 | 0:40:39 | |
There's winds at hurricane speeds rushing into the fire, | 0:40:42 | 0:40:45 | |
drawing upward into the rising flames | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
and they consume everything. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:51 | |
And this vapour quickly spread across the planet. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
Probably only took a few hours | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
for it to reach the furthest reaches of the Earth. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
Thanks to our new model of what happened after the impact, | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
we now know that fires spread right around the globe. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:19 | |
But were these fires devastating enough to cause the extinction | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
of all of the world's dinosaurs in a single day? | 0:41:23 | 0:41:27 | |
'To find out, I'm travelling far from the impact site | 0:41:30 | 0:41:33 | |
'to the very tip of South America | 0:41:33 | 0:41:36 | |
'and the remote wilderness of Patagonia.' | 0:41:36 | 0:41:40 | |
Over 4,000 miles away from where the asteroid hit. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:45 | |
I am all the way down here in Chile. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:59 | |
Now, we tend to think of this asteroid | 0:41:59 | 0:42:01 | |
as being absolutely enormous, and it was - 14km in diameter - | 0:42:01 | 0:42:05 | |
but in the context of the size of the Earth, | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
that's like a grain of sand impacting on a bowling ball. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:11 | |
And I want to understand what kind of impact | 0:42:11 | 0:42:15 | |
the asteroid landing here had on the dinosaurs | 0:42:15 | 0:42:20 | |
right down here at the toe of South America. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
Leading the hunt for clues is palaeontologist Marcelo Leppe. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:33 | |
He's taking me to look for dinosaur remains | 0:42:33 | 0:42:36 | |
in a mountain valley that's best accessed on four legs. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:40 | |
Marcelo, can you explain to me how the geology of this valley works? | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
Actually, we are passing through time | 0:42:54 | 0:42:58 | |
and we are moving to the end of the Cretaceous, | 0:42:58 | 0:43:01 | |
to the end of the age of the dinosaurs. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
We are, at the moment, in 80 million years ago, | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
this is Campanian. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:08 | |
So this is fantastic. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:09 | |
As we ride along the valley, as we ride north, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
we're riding from 80 million to 66 million years. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
Through time. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:16 | |
Getting closer to that extinction event. | 0:43:17 | 0:43:20 | |
We've reached the Valley of the Dinosaurs. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
Now I want to see what sort of dinosaurs lived here and find out | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
what happened to them in the hours after the impact. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
So, shall we get off and have a look? | 0:43:36 | 0:43:38 | |
-Yeah, let's leave the horses and look. -Seems like a good idea. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
The place is literally full of bones. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
As you can see, this sunlight is the best | 0:43:48 | 0:43:50 | |
because the angular light is reflecting the bones. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
-Let's see if we can find a dinosaur, then. -Yeah, let's...let's see. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:57 | |
Oh, for example, there. | 0:43:58 | 0:44:00 | |
Or here. | 0:44:01 | 0:44:03 | |
Look, just beside you. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:05 | |
-This, here? -Yes, this is a dinosaur bone. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:08 | |
Oh. That's fantastic. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:10 | |
They're different colour. Greyish, or white. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
Yeah, so what's that, then? | 0:44:12 | 0:44:14 | |
Oh, it looks like a vertebrae. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
Probably the first one. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:18 | |
OK, so...yeah. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:20 | |
That looks like a facet, it looks like the surface of a joint | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
and that would be where the skull sits. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:24 | |
Any ideas what species? | 0:44:24 | 0:44:26 | |
-Yeah, probably a hadrosaur. 99%. -Really? -Yeah. | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
-That's your first hadrosaur, yeah? -Yeah, it is. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:33 | |
'This valley is now a bone bed, four miles long.' | 0:44:34 | 0:44:38 | |
Yes, that is a bit of fossilised bone and they're everywhere. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:44 | |
Scattered across this hillside. | 0:44:44 | 0:44:45 | |
It's just extraordinary. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:47 | |
Once, it was home to herds of hadrosaurs. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
Plant-eaters up to 30-feet long with a distinctive duck-billed face. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:02 | |
But did the dinosaurs down in Patagonia | 0:45:04 | 0:45:07 | |
die on the day the asteroid hit? | 0:45:07 | 0:45:10 | |
Thanks to the team in Bremen, | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
we now know that once the asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula | 0:45:19 | 0:45:22 | |
over 4,000 miles away, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
it took 42 minutes for the superheated cloud of debris | 0:45:25 | 0:45:29 | |
to reach Patagonia. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:31 | |
For much of the planet, | 0:45:33 | 0:45:34 | |
the fires triggered by the burning sky | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
led to total destruction. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:39 | |
But Marcelo has found evidence | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
that that may not have been the story here. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:51 | |
Plants that the hadrosaurs used to eat. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
This is Nothofagus, the southern beech. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
They're all around here, aren't they? | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
And if you want to see it, look at that architecture. | 0:46:02 | 0:46:07 | |
And I want to show you also this one. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
This is from Las Chinas, | 0:46:10 | 0:46:11 | |
the same valley we were looking for the hadrosaurs. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:14 | |
Oh, this is fantastic. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:15 | |
-This is what the hadrosaurs were walking on. -Yeah. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:18 | |
-And if you want to compare it... -Well, that looks incredibly similar. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
Is there actually a relationship | 0:46:21 | 0:46:23 | |
between this fossil leaf and this living one? | 0:46:23 | 0:46:25 | |
Oh, there is a direct line | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
from this fossil and this one that is living today in Patagonia. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
So this is fantastic evidence that, down here in Patagonia, | 0:46:32 | 0:46:35 | |
some spaces did actually make it through. | 0:46:35 | 0:46:37 | |
66 million years ago, this region was warm, wet | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
and dense with vegetation like the southern beech. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:46 | |
A species of plant that survived the fires on impact day. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
And if plants survived, | 0:46:55 | 0:46:56 | |
maybe the dinosaurs here could have done, too. | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
Life down here should have been badly hit, | 0:47:04 | 0:47:08 | |
but the fossil evidence, particularly of plant life, | 0:47:08 | 0:47:12 | |
is telling us a different story - | 0:47:12 | 0:47:14 | |
that the immediate fallout from Chicxulub | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
in Patagonia was not as bad as predicted. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:21 | |
So perhaps our hadrosaurs had a stay of execution, | 0:47:21 | 0:47:25 | |
maybe they made it through that first day. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
But something... | 0:47:28 | 0:47:30 | |
Something got them in the end. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
To determine exactly what did happen in the days, weeks and months | 0:47:36 | 0:47:40 | |
after the asteroid struck, the Bremen team are still | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
hard at work studying rock samples from the impact crater. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
Dr Philippe Claeys thinks he's found perhaps the most important clue yet. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:57 | |
So, Philippe, when this asteroid struck Earth, | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
it had a massive and devastating impact. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
But that didn't quite seal the fate of the dinosaurs, did it? | 0:48:07 | 0:48:09 | |
Probably not. Remember, the dinosaurs were ideally adapted | 0:48:09 | 0:48:13 | |
to the late Cretaceous environment. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:15 | |
They were the ultimate animal for the Cretaceous. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
What happened here is that | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
we have an incredible change in the Earth's system, | 0:48:20 | 0:48:23 | |
basically kills the dinosaur everywhere on Earth - | 0:48:23 | 0:48:27 | |
in Africa, Antarctica, in the forests, or in the savanna. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:30 | |
But what made them extinct? | 0:48:30 | 0:48:32 | |
You talk about a global scale, suddenly. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:33 | |
-What went global? What happened? -What went global is really | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
the ejection of material from the crater. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
-Look at what I have in my pocket - this is gypsum. -Right, OK. | 0:48:39 | 0:48:42 | |
-This was part of Yucatan at the time of impact. -Yeah. -OK? | 0:48:42 | 0:48:46 | |
And this material here contains sulphate. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:49 | |
And this gypsum affects the chemistry of the atmosphere. | 0:48:49 | 0:48:54 | |
It changes it drastically. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:56 | |
This area's meant to be rich in this sort of stuff. | 0:48:56 | 0:48:58 | |
It's supposed to be full of it. But it's not. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:02 | |
We can look for the remnants of it here. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
In the core, it's totally absent, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:07 | |
which means that almost the entire sequence of gypsum | 0:49:07 | 0:49:10 | |
that was present in the sedimentary target | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
at the time of impact went into the atmosphere. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
This is a huge discovery. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
The presence of gypsum means the plume of vaporised rock | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
that spread across the world was dense with sulphates | 0:49:26 | 0:49:31 | |
that blocked sunlight. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:32 | |
The same thing happened after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo | 0:49:38 | 0:49:42 | |
in the Philippines. | 0:49:42 | 0:49:44 | |
Sulphates reduced the amount of sunlight reaching land by 10%, | 0:49:45 | 0:49:49 | |
which caused a drop in global temperatures. | 0:49:49 | 0:49:52 | |
25 years ago, Pinatubo had an incredible effect on the atmosphere. | 0:49:55 | 0:49:59 | |
It cooled it by very little, but it had an effect. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:04 | |
-And it stayed for a couple of years. -Right. | 0:50:04 | 0:50:06 | |
Here, we have an event which is orders of magnitude more important. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
Pinatubo is nothing compared to the Chicxulub impact. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
It is really going global, no place is protected, | 0:50:12 | 0:50:15 | |
no dinosaur can escape | 0:50:15 | 0:50:17 | |
the consequence of the Chicxulub impact. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:19 | |
This is the gypsum. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:21 | |
-This is what killed the dinosaurs. -Wow. | 0:50:21 | 0:50:24 | |
This astonishing find is the final piece of the jigsaw... | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
..allowing us, for the first time, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
to model what finally killed the dinosaurs. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
It's what happened in the days after the impact | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
that made it a global extinction. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
Our blue planet turned grey. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:51 | |
Long after the hot skies cooled, ash and dust in the atmosphere | 0:50:54 | 0:50:59 | |
almost completely blocked out the sun. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:01 | |
As the lights went out, global temperatures plunged | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
more than ten degrees centigrade within days. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
This is where we get to the great irony of the story. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
Because in the end, it wasn't the size of the asteroid... | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
..the scale of the blast, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:29 | |
or even its global reach that made dinosaurs extinct. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:33 | |
It was where the impact happened. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:36 | |
Had the asteroid struck a few moments earlier, | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
or maybe even a couple of seconds later, | 0:51:42 | 0:51:44 | |
then rather than hitting shallow coastal waters, | 0:51:44 | 0:51:47 | |
it might have hit deep ocean. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:50 | |
An impact in the nearby Atlantic or Pacific oceans | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
would have meant much less vaporised rock, | 0:51:55 | 0:51:57 | |
including the deadly gypsum. | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
The cloud would have been less dense | 0:52:02 | 0:52:04 | |
and sunlight could have still reached the planet's surface... | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
..meaning what happened next might have been avoided. | 0:52:09 | 0:52:12 | |
In this cold, dark world, | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
food ran out in the oceans within a week, | 0:52:16 | 0:52:19 | |
and shortly after, on land also. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
With nothing to eat anywhere on the planet, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
the mighty dinosaurs stood little chance of survival. | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
In Patagonia, 10% of plant species went extinct. | 0:52:36 | 0:52:41 | |
The southern beeches would have shed their leaves, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
shutting down for the long winter that the asteroid set off. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:48 | |
The hadrosaurs were left to starve. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
The demise of the dinosaurs down here in Patagonia | 0:52:55 | 0:52:58 | |
was nowhere near as dramatic as being obliterated by a blast wave, | 0:52:58 | 0:53:03 | |
or drowned in a tsunami, | 0:53:03 | 0:53:05 | |
or even being caught up in a colossal forest fire. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:08 | |
But they were doomed, nonetheless. | 0:53:08 | 0:53:11 | |
The dinosaurs as a group were hugely successful and diverse, | 0:53:15 | 0:53:19 | |
they'd been on the planet for more than 150 million years. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:23 | |
But this Chicxulub event was more than just a local phenomenon. | 0:53:24 | 0:53:28 | |
It changed the climate globally, | 0:53:29 | 0:53:32 | |
plunging the world into a deep, deep winter. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
And there was no time to adapt. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
So, in some ways, | 0:53:38 | 0:53:40 | |
the dinosaurs that died instantaneously were the lucky ones. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
This sudden climate change may finally solve the mystery of | 0:53:49 | 0:53:53 | |
what happened in New Jersey. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:54 | |
As the food supply in the oceans dwindled, | 0:53:57 | 0:54:01 | |
shallow water creatures roamed ever deeper. | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
But eventually, the food would run out. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:07 | |
And all of those animals from different parts of the oceans died, | 0:54:10 | 0:54:16 | |
coming to rest in a single layer. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:18 | |
It's been an incredible adventure decades in the planning. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:34 | |
A multi-million-pound scientific expedition, | 0:54:34 | 0:54:38 | |
weeks of drilling rock samples from deep inside a super crater, | 0:54:38 | 0:54:43 | |
and months of studying hundreds of metres of rock samples. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:48 | |
-So, this was E4. -Yep. -Which is 53 million to 55. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:53 | |
We were just jazzed about the science, all day long. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
Many people have been up for 20 hours | 0:54:57 | 0:54:59 | |
and they were still just going with enthusiasm, | 0:54:59 | 0:55:01 | |
describing the cores, looking at the microfossils. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
It was a heady experience. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
All that hard work has paid off in a big way. | 0:55:07 | 0:55:11 | |
The team has been able to reveal extraordinary new details, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:16 | |
evidence about how the dinosaurs died. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
But perhaps even astonishing than what killed the dinosaurs... | 0:55:19 | 0:55:23 | |
..is what happened after they were gone. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:27 | |
The asteroid and its aftermath ended the age of the dinosaurs. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
But as the cloud started to clear, months or years later, | 0:55:37 | 0:55:42 | |
the dormant plants came back to life. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
And a tiny group of animals came out of hiding to inherit the Earth. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:52 | |
Creatures that would, over millions of years, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
evolve into a huge range of different species... | 0:55:55 | 0:55:58 | |
Including us. | 0:55:58 | 0:56:00 | |
On the tip of my finger right here | 0:56:00 | 0:56:02 | |
is a lower tooth of something called mesodma. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:08 | |
This was a little guy who was probably about the size of a mouse. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
This is one tough little mammal. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
One of the very few species known to survive | 0:56:17 | 0:56:19 | |
through the global devastation. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:22 | |
It's a blade-like tooth. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:23 | |
It was able to feed on things like insects and seeds, | 0:56:23 | 0:56:27 | |
so it didn't have to rely on photosynthesis. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
Mammals had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs for 100 million years. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:38 | |
But now it was their turn. | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
This chance event that was the doom of the dinosaurs | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
was a stroke of luck for the surviving mammals. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
With the dinosaurs gone, | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
suddenly, the landscape was empty of competitors | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
and ripe with possibilities. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:56 | |
Just half a million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
and landscapes around the globe had filled up with mammals | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
of all shapes and sizes. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:17 | |
Fast forward another 60 million years or so, | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
and we have the evolution of an extraordinary upright walking ape | 0:57:25 | 0:57:28 | |
that contemplates its own existence | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
and the demise of ancient creatures they'd never even seen. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
Chances are, if it wasn't for that asteroid, | 0:57:35 | 0:57:38 | |
we wouldn't be here to tell the story today. | 0:57:38 | 0:57:41 |