Scientists have long speculated that the demise of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago was due to starvation triggered by a nuclear winter that followed a major asteroid impact.

However, disturbing new research suggests the prehistoric megadeath may have come quicker and burned hotter.

A recent study published in the journal JGR Biogeosciences proposes that extreme heat and rampant fires may have played a major role in eradicating/burning to death land-based life, including the dinosaurs.

Scientists generally agree that when the six-mile-wide Chicxulub meteorite struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous Period, it vaporized huge quantities of rock that condensed into tiny droplets.

These droplets, known as spherules, were cast around the planet before falling back through Earth’s atmosphere at several miles per second.

When the spherules slowed in their free fall, their kinetic energy became heat, creating a worldwide surge of thermal radiation.

Previous research posits that this heat surge was powerful enough to kill thin-skinned animals but not intense enough to set vegetation ablaze and barbecue thick-skinned animals like the dinosaurs.

However, in 2023, at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota, researchers identified a deposit layer above the spherules.

Researchers believe this fine dust cloud could have functioned as a kind of prehistoric insulating blanket, trapping thermal radiation on Earth’s surface and igniting worldwide wildfires.

 “With the dust cloud trapping thermal radiation, it was like the surface, and everything on it was being charbroiled – and that’s what killed the dinosaurs and all the other animals,” lead author Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, said in a statement.

Johnson and his team estimate that this heat blanket could have made the heat surge 3.5 times more powerful than previous calculations estimated and intense enough to start spontaneous forest fires.

“We’re in the realm where we might be essentially killing off everything within that first hour or two,” added Johnson.

The radiation could have ignited grass, lichen, and pine needles, which served as fuel for larger fires.

Meanwhile, land animals would have been exposed to 17 times the thermal dose considered deadly to humans.

“It probably looked like hell,” said Johnson. “The clouds would have blocked daylight, so to any animal, like humans, that don’t see far into the infrared, the surface would have probably looked dark.”

The researchers believe that animals that were water-based or sheltering underground could have potentially survived the heat pulse; however, the same troublesome dust that turned Earth into a broiler setting likely blocked sunlight for several years, thereby inciting the long starving winter long considered the ultimate death knell for dinosaurs.

One complication, however, is that wildfire evidence has thus far only been found in North America. It is possible that a record of global wildfires could still be discovered.

Researchers maintain that knowing whether animals burned alive quickly or starved slowly is critical for understanding the impact a major event like Chicxulub had on extinction, evolution, and ecosystem recovery.

In 2022, another discovery shed light on why some species of mammals, crocodiles, turtles, and birds improbably survived the Cretaceous era’s extinction event.

A team of European scientists from Vrije Universiteit, Uppsala University, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility found that the planet’s seasonal climate might have inadvertently protected some of those prehistoric animals.

“Annual life cycles, including seasonal timing and duration of reproduction, feeding, hibernation and aestivation, vary strongly across latest Cretaceous biotic clades,” the paleontology team wrote.

“We postulate that the timing of the Chicxulub impact in boreal [northern] spring and austral autumn was a major influence on selective biotic survival.”

Earlier this year, scientists confirmed the skull of a supersized dinosaur from “hell” with a swordlike horn protruding from its head was found in Niger. The dinosaur, dubbed Spinosaurus mirabilis, stood 16-20 feet tall and was roughly the same size as the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex.

More recently, scientists discovered a bizarre ‘turducken’ fossil that suggests something of a death-heavy nesting doll: a flying dinosaur was eaten by a 23-foot reptile, then devoured by a 40-foot marine monster.