It was previously thought that the falling spherules, as the tiny rocks are called, heated up the atmosphere by several degrees for up to 20 minutes – hot enough and long enough to cause whole forests to spontaneously burst into flames

The new species, which lived 71 to 75 million years ago, has been named Hollanda luceria, after the punk/country band Lucero and the Holland family, whose donations helped to support the research

At number 7 is the finding of the fossil of Raptorex kriegsteini, a tiny Tyrannosaurus rex, which gave rise to the giant mighty T.Rex

A new analysis by palaeontologists studying a well-preserved skull and partial skeleton of a feathered dinosaur, Sinornithosaurus, living some 125 million years ago in northeast China reveal that it used poison to hunt down its prey