Asteroid wiped out dinosaurs

A HUGE asteroid that smashed into Earth with the force of a billion atomic bombs wiped out the dinosaur, scientists said on Thursday, hoping to lay to rest a long-running debate over a mass extinction 65 million years ago.

An international panel of experts reviewed 20 years' worth of evidence about might have caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including dinosaurs.

They determined that a massive asteroid, measuring around 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide, that smashed into what is today Chicxulub in Mexico was behind the mass extinction, which cleared the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

'The asteroid is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima,' the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science.

'It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days,' they said.

The panel of 41 scientists hope their findings will lay to rest once and for all the debate about what caused the KT extinction.