Scientists have revealed the most detailed picture yet of the day an asteroid ended the reign of the dinosaurs, finding vivid evidence of how a giant sulphur cloud blocked the sun and resulted in their deaths.

A minute-by-minute account of the aftermath of the strike, which hit Earth with the power of ten billion atomic bombs 66 million years ago, has been pieced together using a rock sample from the 90-mile-wide crater it created off the coast of Mexico.

The study confirmed the theory that it was not fire or flood that caused the dinosaurs’ extinction: it was a sudden denial of sunlight.

Without the mass extinction that ensued, humans would never have evolved.

Obtained from beneath the seabed, the column of rock shows how…