Twenty years ago, references to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event confidently stated that this occurred around 65 million years ago, the date of the extinction of the Dinosauria et al seems to have been pushed back to a million years earlier. When did this change in chronology happen?

Sixty-five Million Years or Sixty-six Million Years?

Team members at Everything Dinosaur have been reviewing the huge inventory of blog posts that have been built up over the last fifteen years or so. It has been noted that the extinction of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and a large portion of other types of life on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous in the numerous early blog articles that reference this event, is estimated to have occurred around sixty-five million years ago. In later articles, the date given is approximately sixty-six million years ago.

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In 2013, Everything Dinosaur reported upon the work of an international team of scientists that had calculated the most accurate date for the extraterrestrial impact that created the Chicxulub crater. Researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre (University of California), in co-operation with colleagues from Glasgow University and Vrije University (Amsterdam, Holland), have concluded that a meteorite, asteroid or possibly even an object such as a comet collided with the Earth approximately 66.038 million years ago (plus or minus 11,000 years).

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Could this scientific paper have marked the point in time, when the point in time marking the end of the non-avian dinosaurs was changed in popular culture?

Here is a link to our 2013 blog post: Most Accurate Date to Date for the end-Cretaceous Mass Extinction Event.