Ammonites, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and most famously, dinosaurs, are just a small percentage of the 75% of species that went extinct at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. What caused this mass extinction? Was it a giant meteor impact? Massive outpourings of lava and gas? Or something else all together? Join Ph.D. student, Courtney Sprain, as she walks you through the very Berkeley-centric history of the of the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and how current UC-Berkeley scientists are employing new techniques to further understand what really killed the dinosaurs.

Courtney Sprain is a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. In addition to her work at the Berkeley Geochronology Center with Paul Renne on late Cretaceous Earth history, Courtney Sprain works on the records of late Mesoproterozoic paleogeography and paleointensity from the North American Midcontinent Rift in the UC Berkeley Paleomagnetism Lab.