The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Came From Beyond Jupiter

Fresh analysis of the impact debris points to the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous being an exceptionally rare CO-type carbonaceous chondrite — a body that formed in the cold outer reaches of the solar system, beyond Jupiter, before it found Earth 66 million years ago and left the crater at Chicxulub.

I like this one because it refuses to stay in a single box. It’s geochemistry — reading the fingerprint of a rock in a thin clay layer worldwide. It’s stratigraphy — that layer is the K–Pg boundary, the line in the rock where one world ends and another begins. And it’s paleontology — everything above the line is a different planet’s worth of animals.

The dinosaurs I dug never saw it coming, and never would have: my Morrison animals were already 84 million years gone by the time that rock fell. But stand at the right outcrop and you can put a finger on the boundary clay — deep time made touchable. That’s the connection this site is built on. The geology pages start there.

Source: reporting on July 2026 research via ScienceDaily.