By JONATHAN CHADWICK, ASSISTANT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
Published: 14:00 EDT, 23 October 2025 | Updated: 07:06 EDT, 24 October 2025
It is one arguably one of the most pivotal stages in our history.
But what really happened around the time when an asteroid smashed into the Earth 66 million years ago?
Scientists may finally have the answer, after discovering the remains of the last surviving dinosaurs in New Mexico.
Their fossil evidence suggests that there was wide variety of dinosaurs in New Mexico at the time of the impact – including Alamosaurus, a huge creature the size of a blue whale.
According to experts from the University of Edinburgh, this indicates that, contrary to popular belief, the dinosaurs were in their prime when the fateful day arrived.
‘An inconvenient truth is that until now paleontologists have had few fossils of dinosaurs unequivocally dated to the last few hundred thousand years of the Cretaceous, before the asteroid hit, so much of our understanding of the extinction was extrapolated from older fossils and statistical analyses,’ said Professor Steve Brusatte, co–author of the study.
‘Now in New Mexico we have fossils of dinosaurs that were there right at the end and when we compare them with the only other fossils accurately dated from this time, from further north, we can see they are much different.
‘There clearly were many types of dinosaurs thriving up until that moment the asteroid ended it all.’
The fossil evidence suggests that there was wide variety of dinosaurs in New Mexico at the time of the impact – including huge creatures the size of a blue whale, dubbed Alamosaurus (artist’s impression)
Dinosaurs were in their prime that fateful day 66 million years ago when a 10–mile–wide asteroid hit the Earth, causing ‘carnage’, report scientists (file photo)