Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid struck off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing 75 percent of life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The space rock left a roughly 100-mile-wide crater and destroyed global ecosystems. Now, a new study shows that it took more than 10 million years of evolution before biodiversity recovered.

And the scientists behind the study say their find carries a grave warning for our current era of human-caused extinction, dubbed