For decades most earth scientists have concluded that nonavian dinosaurs and other critters like ammonites and fully three-quarters of life on Earth met their demise and went extinct courtesy of a massive asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago. They base this conclusion on evidence of the huge subsurface Chicxulub crater off the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico and rare iridium elements found in 66-million-year-old sediments around the globe. Now, per a report in the journal Science Advances, scientists say they’ve found evidence not just on Earth but on our companion Moon.
The new findings come courtesy of China’s Chang’e-5 mission. That mission brought lunar soil samples back to Earth for the first time since the U.S. Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As described by a team led by Tao Long (Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences), those samples include microscopic glass beads dated to 66 million years ago. These tiny samples suggest the big collision from the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs was likely accompanied by smaller collisions from pieces of that same asteroid as it broke up and hit both Earth and the Moon.