Scientists are learning more about how life on Earth recovered after drilling into the "peak wall" of the massive Chicxulub Crater gouged into the ocean floor off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The killer asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs and 75 percent of life on Earth.

Research being undertaken by scientists and geophysicists working for the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling is focusing on a ring of mountains surrounding the crater left by the asteroid impact. This ring hasn't been studied yet.

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The research should shed more light on how mammals, and eventually humans, profited from this global catastrophe.

It's generally well-accepted that a monstrous asteroid about 150 kilometers wide struck the Gulf of Mexico some 66 million years ago. This extinction event led to the demise of the dinosaurs but opened the door for other living organisms, first mammals and later humans, to take the place of the dinosaurs.

This site of this stupefying asteroid impact has since been called the Chicxulub Crater. The research team aboard the Liftboat Myrtle, a drilling platform once used to drill for oil, has now drills into rocks dating from the day the Earth was hit by the asteroid. They began drilling into the Chicxulub Crater last April.

Drilling into the peak ring should tell the scientists more about the asteroid that caused it, said Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who co-leads the team with Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College in London and a leader of the expedition.

He said the rocks they've recovered show how life began to recover after the catastrophe. Gulick said the expedition has discovered limestone and rocks containing fossils dating from after the impact

Gulick believes the rocks from the peak ring are extremely valuable. If any microscopic organisms survived near the site of the asteroid impact, their fossils might be in these samples.

The cataclysm ended the age of the dinosaurs but the few creatures that survived went on to dominate and shape the world.

"The mammals survived," said Morgan. "And that led on to our own evolution."

TagsChicxulub crater, yucatan peninsula, Mexico, European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling, asteroid, Liftboat Myrtle, Sean Gulick, Joanna Morgan