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The dinosaurs' demise may have been due to an asteroid double-whammy—two giant space rocks that struck near Mexico and India a few hundred thousand years apart, scientists say. For decades one of the more popular theories for what killed the dinosaurs has focused on a single asteroid impact 65 million years ago.
A six-mile-wide (ten-kilometer-wide) asteroid is thought to have carved out the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, triggering worldwide climate changes that led to the mass extinction. But the controversial new theory says the dinosaurs were actually finished off by another 25-mile-wide (40-kilometer-wide) asteroid. That space rock slammed into the planet off the western coast of India about 300,000 years after Chicxulub, experts say.
"The dinosaurs were really unlucky," said study co-author Sankar Chatterjee, a paleontologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Chatterjee thinks this second asteroid impact created a 300-mile-wide (500-kilometer-wide) depression on the Indian Ocean seafloor, which his team began exploring in 1996.
His team has dubbed this depression the Shiva crater, after the Hindu god of destruction and renewal. "If we are correct," Chatterjee said, "this is the largest crater known on Earth."
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