The Chicxulub Crater is said to be the result of the collision with an asteroid measuring some ten to twenty km across.

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The environmental effects that accompanied its formation were thought to have been responsible for the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, about sixty five million years ago, in which the last of the dinosaurs, along with many other species, disappeared

The team of fourty one international scientists came to their conclusion after analyzing the past twenty years of research.

The mass extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs and some large marine reptiles, the scientists decided.

The fifteen-kilometre wide asteroid is believed to have hit the planet with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.