Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 6, 2022

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, with its center located offshore, near the town of Chicxulub. The crater is about 180 kilometers (110 mi) in diameter, making it one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world; the asteroid whose impact (animation shown) formed the crater was at least 10 km (6 mi) in diameter. Discovered by geophysicists looking for petroleum in the late 1970s, the impact structure was formed around 66 million years ago near the end of the Cretaceous period. It is widely accepted that the devastation and climate disruption from the impact was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, in which around 75 percent of all plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs. A 2021 study stated that the impactor likely originated in the outer main part of the asteroid belt.