The Season 4 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds opens with a new take on a very old event. After a mishap sends the Enterprise 65 million years into the past, the crew tries to mediate a conflict between two species who call our solar system home. But time travel is a funny thing, and our heroes can’t stop the affair from escalating until one species has been annihilated and a chunk of their planet is hurdling towards the Earth.
Amid all this excitement, the image of that rock slamming into the Yucatan peninsula and causing a very bad day for the dinosaurs encountered by the Enterprise’s ground crew is the episode’s most familiar element. But while the story of how the dinosaurs went extinct is a pop culture staple, the research that unfolded in reality wasn’t without its own drama.
