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Chicxulub crater is a large crater buried under the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) and the Gulf of Mexico, roughly a hundred miles in diameter, which was detected and identified around 1980. It is thought to result from a major impact 66 million years ago by a comet or asteroid estimated to have been on the order of 5 miles in diameter. The date coincides with a boundary between geological layers and with an extinction event indicated by the fossil record that included the disappearance of three fourths of plant and animal species including the non-avian dinosaurs. It is not the largest impact known, but none of the known impacts since then have been as large.