"If You Were a Dinosaur in Canada When That Asteroid Hit the Yucatán, You Had Approximately Two Minutes to Live"

"Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula, leaving behind a crater 110 miles wide and twenty miles deep and a colossally larger hole in the tree of life. The impact and its after­effects wiped out an estimated 75 percent of species, including, most famously, all non-avian dinosaurs. That event, the end-­Cretaceous extinction, is one of six massive die-offs in the history of the planet. Five of them happened in the distant past: 450 million, 375 million, 252 million, 200 million, and 66 million years ago. The sixth one is happening right now."


Kathryn Schulz in New York reviews Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.