THE SKY · 66,000,000 YEARS AGO · THE PROTO-GULF OF MEXICO
The asteroid misses by an hour
Sixty-six million years ago, a rock ten kilometres wide crossed Earth’s orbit at the exact wrong moment, and the age of giants ended in an afternoon. This is the timeline where it crossed one hour early — and the age of giants never ended at all.
THE LAST EVENING OF THE CRETACEOUS
For a week there has been a new star low in the southern sky, brighter every night, and nothing on Earth is equipped to wonder about it. The world it hangs over has been rich and warm for a hundred and sixty million years: tyrannosaurs pacing the river mouths, hadrosaur herds on the far banks, seas full of coiled ammonites. The rock is ten kilometres wide and travelling at twenty kilometres a second, and the appointment it is about to keep is the narrowest in this atlas: Earth itself moves its own width through space every seven minutes.