Boltysh crater in Ukraine formed around the same time as the Chicxulub event, raising questions about its role in this tumultuous era.

Boltysh crater, a 15-mile-wide formation in central Ukraine, may not be as famous as the Chicxulub crater under the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which is directly implicated in the death of the dinosaurs and many other species about 66 million years ago.

Some have suggested that the crater, which is buried under more than 1,000 feet of sediment, could have formed before or after the Chicxulub event, making its role in this cataclysmic period unclear.

Now, a team led by Annemarie Pickersgill, a research associate at the University of Glasgow, estimates that Boltysh formed about 650,000 years after the Chicxulub catastrophe.

“It’s the first comparison of Boltysh samples directly to K-Pg boundary samples,” Dr.

The new age estimate places Boltysh about a half-million years after the dinosaur-killing asteroid, contradicting the conclusions of a 2010 study in Geology that dated it to a few thousand years before Chicxulub.

Pickersgill’s team raises the possibility that Boltysh could be linked to a warming event, called the lower C29N hyperthermal, which occurred around the same time, though confirming that relationship would require more substantial evidence.

He added that one way to build on the new study was to collect more samples from Boltysh and other impact craters to further refine their ages and the properties of the objects that created them