Stevns Klint Experience

Tyrannosaurus Rexes the size of buses, and overgrown lizards with gigantic wingspans. The world looked very different 66 million years ago – right up until that fateful day when a gigantic meteor hit the Earth and destroyed half of all life on the planet. Even the mighty dinosaurs couldn’t survive the forces of nature and the 2,500 billion ton meteor heading straight for Earth.

Today, Stevns Klint is the best place on the planet to see evidence of the asteroid that changed the world forever, so much so that it has even earned a place on UNESCO’s coveted World Heritage List. The dinosaurs died, but against all odds, some smaller animals survived the great mass extinction and evolved into the life we know today. In fact, one small marsupial-like mammal is the distant ancestor of all living mammals – including you and me.

At Stevns Klint Experience Centre, you can meet Lucky the mammal – named because of just how lucky we are to be here – and learn more about a simultaneously deadly and life-giving chapter in the lifespan of the planet and man. Lucky, because life went on. The dramatic story is brought to life in the Experience Centre’s cinema, projected on a giant limestone block carved out of Stevns Klint itself, while the exhibition presents dinosaur skeletons, meteorites, fossils and interactive games. Just the ticket for the future’s little natural scientists!

The meteor landed on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico at such a high speed that the Earth was close to melting, the waves turned into tsunamis, the sea boiled, and when the temperatures finally dropped, an ash cloud covered the sun for 10 years. And without sun, there’s no life on Earth. The dinosaurs that weren’t killed by the asteroid’s waves would have suffocated.

The special thing about Stevns Klint is the thin layer of fish clay that is wedged between the chalk and lime. This fish clay is our best evidence of what actually happened back then, 66 million years ago. Without this fish clay, humans would not have solved the riddle of our own existence. The fish clay marks the transition from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene period.

Stevns Klint Experience is located on an elevation in Boesdal Quarry, camouflaged by vegetation and with a view over the limestone quarry and the Baltic Sea. A few kilometres away, you can see Stevns Klint rising high above sea level.