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About 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into the Earth triggering a mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and snuffed out 75 percent of life. While the asteroid killed off scores of species, a new study has found that the crater it left behind was home to sea life less than a decade after impact, and contained a thriving ecosystem within 30,000 years - a much quicker recovery than other sites around the globe. The evidence for life at the impact site comes primarily in the form of microfossils - the remains of unicellular organisms like algae and plankton - as well as the burrows of larger organisms discovered in a rock extracted from the crater. [Source: Florida State University]
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