The rock that wiped out the dinosaurs was about six miles across, taller than Mount Everest, moving at 45,000 miles an hour. It hit shallow sea off what is now Mexico at 60 degrees, which a 2020 Imperial College London study found was close to the deadliest angle possible. The steep angle mattered more than the size. Coming in at 60 degrees threw the most rock and gas high into the sky, where wind could spread it around the world. And the target was the worst it could have picked, shallow seafloor made of sulfur-rich rock. The impact turned that rock to vapor and threw billions of tons of sulfur into the air. The blast, equal to billions of Hiroshima bombs, was only the start. As the debris thrown into space fell back to Earth, friction turned each piece into a glowing hot pellet. For up to an hour, the sky over much of the planet glowed like the inside of an oven set to broil. Anything caught in the open cooked. The only land animals with a real chance were the ones that could hide underground or underwater. At a site in North Dakota, nearly 2,000 miles from the crater, scientists found fish buried with tiny beads of impact glass still stuck in their gills. Those fish died within an hour of the strike, killed by a wave that sloshed out of an inland sea when the ground heaved. What finished the dinosaurs came slower. The sulfur and dust wrapped around the whole planet and blocked out the sun, and with the light gone the warmth went too, dropping global temperatures by several degrees and keeping them down for years, in some models more than a decade. Plants need sunlight to make food, so in the dark they died. The plant-eaters starved. Then the animals that hunted them starved as well, and the loss climbed up the food chain until about three quarters of every species on Earth was gone. Here is the part the joke gets right. Birds are dinosaurs. They split off from small meat-eating dinosaurs more than 150 million years ago and lived alongside the giant ones for over 100 million years. Most birds died in the disaster too, including every last one that still had teeth. The ones that made it were small, ground-living birds with beaks that could crack open seeds, and seeds can sit buried in the soil for years, waiting out a disaster. Those few survivors became every bird alive today, more than 10,000 species. The pigeon outside your window is a dinosaur whose family lived through the single worst day this planet has ever had.