The presentation of the 2025 Docville scientific documentary "De dag dat het zonlicht niet meer scheen" is scheduled for April 02 2025 at 19:30 in Cinema ZED Vesalius in Leuven, as part of the Science Pitch Docu's. If you wish to see AMGC researchers discussing the extinction of dancing dinosaurs, make sure you do not miss this unique opportunity.
The message conveyed by this documentary is that the > 120 million years of dinosaurs' dominance on this planet ended as a gigantic rock from out of space impacted the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, forming the 200 km size Chicxulub crater.
The documentary allegorically, nostalgically, and musically explains the demise of these almost innocent and happy-dancing dinosaurs, which was caused by the huge volume of dust produced by the excavation of the Chicxulub structure in Yucatan. This dust cooled the Earth and blocked photosynthesis for years, leading to global changes and the mass extinction of ~ 60% of the Earth's fauna and flora 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous.
The documentary also illustrates the fieldwork carried out by Pim Kaskes, Cem Berk Senel, and Johan Vellekoop to understand the event and their sampling of the fatal clay layer in the Western US to understand how this biosphere catastrophe took place.
Below are images of fieldwork in the US Western Interior, after digging in the mud as a geologist, Cem goes back to modelling and plays with partial differential equations and model planets (see images below).