Like i understand it was probably during Pangea times, but i can’t wrap my head around it.
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Asteroid does boom, lots of dust in the air all over the world, no sunlight, plants die, no food, dinosaurs die
They didn’t all die at the time of the impact… it was similar to a volcanic explosion, except instead of smoke and ash, it just filled the air with so much dirt (like a dust storm) that it literally blocked out the sun. In some places the dirt in the air was so thick that creatures would have suffocated. In other places, there were widespread famines as plants died and food became scarce.
It was literally years without sunshine across huge areas.
It was not during pangea. What you gotta ralize is that most of them didnt die because of the impact. But it had an impact worldwide like on weather. Plants all over the world couldnt get enough sunlight so they started dying, because of that herbivorous dinosaurs didnt have enough to eat and started dying, and because of that at last carnivorous dinosaurs didnt have enough to eat and died out.
It didn’t, we still have birds. Other than than, there’s some evidence that asteroid didn’t “singlehandedly” caused mass extinction, there was also volcanic activity before, and even more so after the impact (probably caused by it), and rise of extinction before. So, asteroid was more like the last nail in the coffin.
But generally speaking, that impact caused few years of volcanic winter, when Earth’s atmosphere was contaminated with dust and light was partially blocked, therefore plants had hard time surviving. Less plants – less herbivores, less herbivores – less carnivores, less species overall. And less species and animals – less scavengers and detrivores (creatures that eat decaying organic matter). All life is a complex system with many interconnections, so if you remove one chain’s ring – whole chain falls apart, and that affects connected chains too, like a domino.
It kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere it blocked out the sun for years. Without sunlight, all the plants died, and everything else died with them because there’s nothing to eat.
Depending on where the dinosaurs were in relation to impact it’d either have been a quick or slow death.
Ones closest to impact would have died from the explosion itself, then further afield you get tsunamis that devastate the coastline, further afield again you actually get in-land earthquakes that cause in-land tsunamis on open bodies of water.
Also tiny pieces of molten metal would have been thrown up in the atmosphere but when they come down they’re still hot, which heats up the air but also causes mass forest fires.
After all of the initial major trauma deaths you’d have a lot of ash and debris in the atmosphere that cuts out sunlight and cools the planet. The plants die, the herbivores die, the carnivores die. Only smaller, adaptable mammals and dinosaurs survive until the atmosphere eventually clears up and plant colonisation recommences which in turn supports food chains again.
David Attenborough actually did a new documentary [Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016djt/dinosaurs-the-final-day-with-david-attenborough) about it recently. I found it very interesting and it’s all backed by new fossil discoveries.
It does seem odd that something only 10 miles wide could totally mess up our planet and kill it’s dominant animal life forms, but bear in mind that it’s coming in at a very rapid speed relative to the Earth (12 miles per second), so when it plows in to the Earth it releases huge amounts of energy.
It was like 4 1/2 billion Hiroshima bombs going off at once. 25 trillion tons of rock was blasted into the atmosphere, much of it re-entering as burning meteors. The majority of the world’s forests burned.
The immense amounts of dust and sulfur released by the impact hung in the atmosphere for years, blocking out the sun, preventing plants from growing and starving/freezing out the surviving dinosaurs.
A really big impact like that results in significant climate change, think nuclear winter. That resulted in an extinction event leaving only one clade of dinosaurs – birds.
The Kurzgesagt YouTube channel did a pretty good video explaining the events of that day: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA)
Not all dinosaurs died from the asteroid.
The asteroid caused a lot of very fast climate change which resulted in all but the smallest animals to go extinct.
So some of the smaller dinosaurs survived, and are still alive today.
And with all the large dinosaurs gone, mammals could take their place.
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