Dinosaurs could have avoided extinction if the meteor had landed just about anywhere else

Controversial new research has highlighted just how unlucky the dinosaurs were

Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide meteorite blazed across the sky and slammed into the continental shelf of Mexico's Yucatan peninsular.

The impact shook the planet with the force of 10 billion nuclear bombs and threw enough rubble into the sky to partially blot out the sun. It resulted in the death of 75% of the world's biodiversity and has come do be known as the K-T extinction event.

The cataclysmic impact wiped out the dinosaurs and paved the way for mammals to emerge and, eventually to evolve into us.

That the dinosaurs were unlucky is not in question. But just how unlucky they were to be wiped off the face of the Earth by a flying chunk of rock is the subject of new research published this week in the journal Scientific Reports .

Paleontologist Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University and Naga Oshima, an atmospheric chemist at Japan's Meteorological Research Institute have argued that the asteroid had a 1-in-10 chance of triggering a mass extinction when it collided with Earth.

That's on top of the fact that these planetary collisions only occur every 100 million years or so.

According to the pair, at that time only 13% of the Earth's surface contained enough organic material that could be thrown into the stratosphere and cause the blackout. If the asteroid had hit any of the other 87%, the pair believe the dinosaurs would be alive today.

"Soot could be the main cause of mass extinction after an asteroid impact," states the research.

"The history of life on Earth could have varied, then, according to impact site, and depended on minute differences in the orbital forcing of asteroids.

"The probability of mass extinction was quite low even with an asteroid as large as the K/Pg bolide, because hydrocarbon-rich and sulfate-rich sites were rare. If the asteroid had hit a low–medium hydrocarbon area on Earth, mass extinction could not have occurred and the Mesozoic biota could have persisted beyond the K/Pg boundary."

Not everyone agrees with this idea of quite how unlucky the dinosaurs were.

“I agree with the concept that location matters when you think of an asteroid strike,” geophysicist Sean Gulick told Popular Science .

“I fall on the side that it's not a singular thing. There’s a huge range of possibilities that we’re testing and I don’t think it was a single punch.”