Impact: AMNH’s New Exhibit Recreates the Asteroid Strike That Ended the Dinosaurs

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has opened "Impact," a sweeping, multidisciplinary exhibition that reconstructs the asteroid strike 66 million years ago widely credited with ending the Cretaceous and extinguishing non-avian dinosaurs. Curator of paleontology Roger Benson calls the event, in effect, Earth’s "worst day of the last half-billion years."

Sixty-six million years ago, a space rock—roughly the size of Mount Everest—slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula with an energy equivalent to about 10 billion atomic bombs. Nearby forests were flash-ignited as atmospheric temperatures briefly spiked to around 500°F. Many large animals were buried in ash; others survived by digging underground or diving beneath the water.

The impact blasted an enormous plume of dust and soot into the atmosphere that ultimately cloaked the planet in a long, sun‑blocking gloom. Tiny glass spherules formed in the fireball and rained down as far away as Wyoming. The event also triggered global earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis, compounding the immediate devastation.

"It sounds like science fiction or the stuff of Hollywood movies," Benson said. "But the scientific account of this extinction is the product of centuries of careful, interdisciplinary research."

How scientists pieced the story together

The first clue was the K–Pg boundary, a thin, dark clay layer in the rock record above which dinosaur fossils abruptly disappear. That anomaly was noted by geologists as early as the late 1700s, but its cause stayed mysterious until the 1980s, when Walter Alvarez and Louis Alvarez discovered unusually high concentrations of iridium in the layer—an element far more common in extraterrestrial objects than in Earth’s crust. That finding pointed strongly to an impact origin.

Subsequent work by specialists across the sciences filled in the picture: meteorite researchers identified the impact site at the Chicxulub crater in Mexico; marine paleontologists documented mass die-offs consistent with rapid ocean acidification; and paleobotanists and evolutionary biologists traced how life gradually recovered, with mammals and other groups expanding into ecological niches left vacant by the dinosaurs.

The exhibition experience

"Impact" leads visitors through the catastrophe in chronological sequence. Early galleries present sweeping panoramas of late Cretaceous ecosystems—a mosasaur hunting a plesiosaur in the sea, a triceratops and small mammals moving through a lush forest—and then pivot to the instant of rupture. A six-minute film reconstructs the strike and its immediate, planet-wide consequences. The final sections focus on the long aftermath: extinction, recovery, and the rise of new groups in a reshaped world.

"It's been a tremendous coalescence of ideas," said Denton Ebel, a meteorite specialist at the museum, describing decades of collaborative research that produced the modern account of the event.

A modern lesson

Benson hopes visitors leave with two impressions: the fragility of life in the face of sudden global change, and life’s remarkable resilience. He also draws a sober contemporary parallel: current human-driven losses of biodiversity represent a different kind of crisis—one that, unlike an asteroid strike, can be mitigated by our choices.

"We live on a changing planet," Benson said, noting that extinction rates over roughly the last 100 years may be comparable to those during past mass extinctions—"but we still have time."

The "Impact" exhibition opened to the public on Nov. 17.