Just to add to what Rahul wrote the extinction of the dinosaurs was one of the 5 great extinction events but it wasn't actually the most dramatic. The Permian extinction erased about 90% of all of the species on earth and very nearly wiped life out entirely.
Major extinction events are drivers for evolution. Whole series of niches suddenly become available and survivors tend to evolve at accelerated rates to take advantage of them.
One of the most interesting periods to look at, and one about which we know very little is the aftermath of the dinosaur extinction. Recently a raft of fossils have been found in an open cast mine in South America that dates to 60 million years ago. If you are interested you can find details on Titanoboa (probably the largest snake that ever lived) that comes from that period on Youtube.
Just to add one more thing - it looks like the dinosaurs actually died out remarkably quickly after the meteor impact. It appears that the meteor kicked off a shitstorm of climate change and they (along with a whole host of other species) couldn't survive it. In fact, it appears that nothing bigger than a chicken survived on land. Probably more surprising that the dying off of the dinosaurs was the extinction of the giant marine reptiles. It is not clear why this happened - particularly as the crocs survived and some of those were very large indeed (2 to 3 times bigger than a nile crocodile of today).
Major extinction events are drivers for evolution. Whole series of niches suddenly become available and survivors tend to evolve at accelerated rates to take advantage of them.
One of the most interesting periods to look at, and one about which we know very little is the aftermath of the dinosaur extinction. Recently a raft of fossils have been found in an open cast mine in South America that dates to 60 million years ago. If you are interested you can find details on Titanoboa (probably the largest snake that ever lived) that comes from that period on Youtube.
Just to add one more thing - it looks like the dinosaurs actually died out remarkably quickly after the meteor impact. It appears that the meteor kicked off a shitstorm of climate change and they (along with a whole host of other species) couldn't survive it. In fact, it appears that nothing bigger than a chicken survived on land. Probably more surprising that the dying off of the dinosaurs was the extinction of the giant marine reptiles. It is not clear why this happened - particularly as the crocs survived and some of those were very large indeed (2 to 3 times bigger than a nile crocodile of today).
