
'Hell fish' likely killed by dinosaur-ending asteroid is preserved in stunning detail
Scientists recently unearthed stunning fossils of sturgeon from Hell's Creek that might have died on the day that the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck.
The Cretaceous, the last and longest period of the dinosaur age, lasted from about 145.5 million to about 65.5 million years ago. During the Cretaceous, mammals were small, about rat size, and the land was ruled by dinosaurs, including the duck-bills (hadrosaurs), horned dinosaurs (Triceratops), long-neck sauropods (Dreadnoughtus) and the tyrannosaurs (Tyrannosaurus rex). When the 79-million-year-long period ended, largely because of a 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) asteroid slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula, about 80 percent of all animal species went extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs.
Related Topics: Archaeology, Fossils, Human Origins, Dinosaurs