Timeline of Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event research Hildebrand and William Boynton reported the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico as a probable impact site. While the controversy continued, the accumulating evidence gradually began to sway the scientific community toward the Alvarez hypothesis. In 2010, an international panel of researchers concluded that impact best explained the extinction event and that Chicxulub was indeed the resulting crater. Because the estimated date of the object's impact and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) coincide, there is now a scientific consensus that this impact was the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which caused the death of most of the planet's non-avian dinosaurs
Chicxulub crater search. Later, through contact with Alan Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the impact origin of the crater includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas. In 2016, a scientific drilling project drilled deep into the peak ring of the impact crater, hundreds of meters below the current sea floor, to obtain rock core samples from the impact itself. The discoveries were widely seen as confirming current theories related to both the crater impact and its effects. In 1978, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo were working for