It's cold, dark, and eerily quiet. You feel like you've arrived in the middle of a frigid

winter's night, but it's actually a spring afternoon. This is just what spring looks like now,

one year since the asteroid hit. Clouds of dust and soot and sulfur block out the sun.

What little light reaches through to illuminate the gloom reveals to you a bleak, desolate wasteland.

You spot the skeletal outline of a dead tree.

What was once some kind of conifer?

Its wood is black and charred and its branches are totally bare.

And surrounding it are countless stumps of fallen

trunks of what was once a thriving late-Cretaceous forest. But that was before the asteroid hit,

before the global wildfires that it triggered and before the impact winter descended on the

world in its aftermath. And now you're standing in an early Paleocene graveyard of that once vibrant habitat.

Every hint of green has vanished, replaced with only shades of gray,

and the whole place carries a lingering stench of smoke and rot.

With the world cast into darkness, photosynthesis has almost completely shut

down, devastating ecosystems across the world. As you slowly creep through the decimated remains

of the forest, you start to wish you'd brought a flashlight. On the ashy ground in front of you

are faint depressions that lead towards the forest edge.

You follow them until eventually you see what might have made them.

An enormous skeleton of a sauropod dinosaur stretches nearly 30 meters across the clearing.

Patches of bone peeked through a layer of dust and ash that has settled over its remains.

You kneel down and gently place your hand on its cold, two-meter-long thigh bone,

a small way of paying your respects to a species,

...