So what killed the critters?
The Chilling Regularity of Mass Extinctions
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-next-mass-extinction/413884/
Introduction:
(The Atlantic) One thing we know for sure is that conditions on Earth were, shall we say, unpleasant for the dinosaurs at the moment of their demise. Alternate and overlapping theories suggest the great beasts were pelted with monster comets, drowned by mega-tsunamis, scorched with lava, starved by a landscape stripped of vegetation, blasted with the radiation of a dying supernova, cloaked in decades of darkness, and frozen in an ice age.
Now, a pair of researchers have new evidence to support a link between cyclical comet showers and mass extinctions, including the one that they believe wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, and Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, traced 260 million years of mass extinctions and found a familiar pattern: Every 26 million years, there were huge impacts and major die-offs. Their work was accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in September.
In recent decades, researchers using other methods have found evidence for a 26-million-year cycle of extinction on Earth, but the idea has remained controversial and unexplained. “I believe that our study, using revised dating of extinctions and craters, and a new method of spectral analysis, is strong evidence for the cycles,” Rampino told me.
Other scientists who have researched mass extinctions are more measured about the latest findings. “I’m sort of agnostic [about the larger theory],” said Paul Renne, the director of Berkeley Geochronology Center. “But I was really disappointed to see they used an age-database for the craters which is full of outdated information.”
Renne is the author of another new study that focuses on the Chicxulub crater, the massive divot beneath the Yucatán Peninsula that was created by the same impact blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Renne and his colleagues believe that the comet or asteroid that blasted into Earth and made Chicxulub also set off a global chain-reaction of volcanic eruptions that accelerated the end of the dinosaurs. Volcanoes were, they believe, erupting continuously for millions of years. Long enough to make Hawaii’s Kilauea, which has been flowing since 1983, seem laughable. (“Kilauea is nothing,” Renne told me. “Kilauea is a flea.”)

An artist's rendering of an asteroid or comet striking Earth.
ANDREA DANTI / SHUTTERSTOCK