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The American Museum of Natural History is re-staging one of the greatest plot twists in the history of Earth—and it involves a killer asteroid, a global winter and a few very unlucky dinosaurs.
"Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs" opens to the public today, November 17, dropping visitors into the moments before, during and after the massive collision 66 million years ago that erased 75% of all species—and eventually cleared the way for mammals (and us) to show up.
This isn’t a redux of your childhood dinosaur hall, though. The museum has leaned into the scale, spectacle and scientific updates: an 18-foot Triceratops yanks down a tree, a 27-foot mosasaur lunges at a plesiosaur and a towering early mammal looks overhead as a reminder that not all of the survivors of the apocalypse necessarily looked like winners at the time.
“What makes this exhibition so exciting is how much of the story we can now tell through science,” said Roger Benson, lead curator of the exhibition and the Macaulay Curator of Dinosaur Paleobiology in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology, in an official statement. “Advances in paleontology and geochemistry have given us an unprecedented look at what happened before, during and after the asteroid hit—including how ecosystems collapsed, adapted and ultimately flourished again.”
The museum pairs the life-size models with dioramas, fossils and a six-minute panoramic video that visualizes the asteroid slamming into what’s now the Yucatan Peninsula at more than 40,000 miles per hour. When the exhibit says “billions-of-nucear-weapons-level energy,” it’s not an exaggeration.
What comes next is a guided journey through planetary disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, a dust-choked sky and temperatures dropping 45 degrees as the Earth remained in the dark for more than a year. Nearly all individual plants and animals on the planet died. But the exhibition keeps returning to the theme of renewal: how ecosystems collapsed and adapted and, eventually, flourished again, bringing about rainforests, Titanoboa-scale snakes and an explosion of mammal diversity that makes the world what it is today.
The Hell Creek Formation comes to life in a new diorama populated with turtles, birds, frogs and a unique hook-handed dinosaur called a Trierarchuncus prairiensis. A tiny burrow-cam lets visitors spy on Mesodma, a diminutive rodent-sized mammal that may have waited out the worst of the aftermath underground. Touchable fossils, like a Triceratops toe bone and a cast of its skin, bring to life the story’s physical evidence.
One of the last sections confronts the unsettling parallel to our own era: giant asteroids may be rare, but humanity itself is now driving biodiversity loss at a pace that echoes past extinctions. Interactive stations explore conservation work and the technologies that scientists use to track and deflect future impactors (yes, literal space lasers).
Designed by the museum’s exhibition team and curated by leading scientists, "Impact" is both a cinematic retelling of a prehistoric crisis and an important reminder that life rebounds, even if it means a different cast of characters.
