Paleocene by Mike Keesey

Sixty-six million years ago, the world ended.

An asteroid over ten kilometers in diameter—wider than Mount Everest is tall—slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact unleashed two million times as much energy as the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. A megatsunami a hundred meters tall crashed into the northern coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. Well over four thousand cubic kilometers of matter melted or vaporized in less than a second, leaving a crater thirty kilometers deep, briefly, before it began to fill. All life in the region was obliterated in the blink of an eye.

For the rest of the world, death was slower—at least where there were no firestorms nor ejecta re-entering the atmosphere. A shroud of soot and dust engulfed the Earth, blotting out the Sun. In the seas, coccolithophorid algae were unable to photosynthesize. Their massive die-off had a domino effect up the food chain, completely wiping out inoceramid and rudist clams, ammonoid and belemnoid mollusks, and the great marine reptiles: mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. On land, most plant life withered and died, leading to the extinction of winged pterosaurs and, most famously, non-avian dinosaurs. Three quarters of all life on Earth perished.

But we survived.

Not “we” as in humankind. This was long before anything resembling Homo sapiens. But our proto-primate ancestors, forebears that we share with all apes, monkeys, tarsiers, lemurs, lorises, and bushbabies—they survived. With clutched hands and shining eyes, they witnessed the end of the world … and the early dawn of a new one.