The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have struck a planet that was already in serious trouble — a new Johns Hopkins study has found evidence of a separate ecological crisis that began about 30,000 years before the impact, coincident with a high-volume pulse of volcanic eruptions in what is now India

A study published in May 2026 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a finding that complicates the standard one-line version of the dinosaur extinction. Two researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, microbiologists Rosanna Baker and Arturo Casadevall, examined sediment samples from three well-documented sites that span the […]