Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact, named after the nearby Mexican town of Chicxulub, carved out a 145-kilometre-wide crater and flung mountains of Earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.

Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt.

New research released on Friday captures a fossilised snapshot of the day nearly 66 million years ago when an asteroid hit Earth, fire rained from the sky and the ground shook far worse than from any modern earthquake. It was the day that nearly all life on Earth went extinct, including the dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex. Credit:AP

Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish. They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper published on Friday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a discovery that has sparked tremendous excitement among paleontologists.

"You're going back to the day that the dinosaurs died," said Timothy Bralower, a Pennsylvania State University paleoceanographer who is studying the impact crater and was not involved with this work. "That's what this is. This is the day the dinosaurs died."