A skeleton of an allosaurus dinosaur on display at Drouot auction house in Paris in October.
But new research out of Harvard University theorizes that the Armageddon causing object came from much farther out than originally believed.
According to this new theory, the devastation came not from a relatively nearby asteroid, but from a sort of long-distance comet that came from the edge of the solar system, in an area known as the Oort cloud.
At that point, according to Amir Siraj, a Harvard student who co-authored the paper with Professor Avi Loeb, "Jupiter acts as a kind of pinball machine."
Some of the comet's fragments entered Earth's orbit, and one — 50 miles across, roughly the size of Boston — slammed into the coast of Mexico.
"I believe their work has several intrinsic problems," Bill Bottke, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told The New York Times .
- Jupiter was to blame for the extinction of the dinosaursExplica
- Asteroid or Comet? Scientists Finally Have Answer to What Led to Extinction of DinosaursNews18
- Where did the asteroid which wiped out dinosaurs came from? Scientists answerWION
- The Comet That Killed The DinosaursEurasia Review
- Dinosaur-killing comet may have come from the edge of the solar systemCNET
- Scientists say Jupiter was responsible for the asteroid that killed the dinosaursTNW
- Harvard researchers theorize dinosaurs were killed by Boston-sized comet chunk from edge of solar systemThe Boston Globe
- Astronomers: A comet fragment, not an asteroid, killed off the dinosaursArs Technica
- What Killed The Dinosaurs And Where Did It Come From?Astrobiology News
