The Mystery

The Earth's history has seen a number of mass extinctions but

the most well known happened 65 million years ago during the late
Cretaceous period, with the death of around 70 per cent of all species.
The dinosaurs went extinct some 64-66 million years ago.
Many wild ideas about how the dinosaurs were rendered extinct were
presented over the years.

What killed the dinosours ?

Hypothesis
The original hypothesis is that an asteroid,a large extraterrestrial
object collided with the Earth, its impact throwing up enough dust
to cause the climatic change.
 Investigation
The iridium layer is what prompted this hypothesis, to blame an
asteroid impact for the extinction — asteroids and similar extraterrestrial
bodies are higher in iridium content than the Earth's crust, so it was thought
that the iridium layer must be composed of the dust from the vaporized
meteor. No crater was found, but it was assumed that one existed that was
about 65 million years old and 100 kilometers (about 65 miles) in diameter.

Later research found a likely candidate for the crater at Chicxulub, on

the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Other evidence was also reported: the
presence of shocked quartz in the rocks of the K-T boundary (indicating the
passage of a shock wave so powerful that it actually rearranged the crystal
structure of quartz grains), glassy spheres that looked like impact
ejecta (molten rock that solidified into droplets when cooled), and a soot layer
was found in many areas (evidence for widespread forest fires). The likelihood
that massive hurricanes and firestorms would have raged across the Earth was
also hypothesized, adding to the destructive power of the catastrophe.

To reconcile the hypothesis with gradual data, it was suggested that rather
than one impact, several impacts (of comets or meteors) could have occurred
over a period of many years. Some evidence supported this — a hint
of periodicity of mass extinctions in the fossil record was reported; mass
extinctions seemed to occur roughly every 26 million years. Astronomers
theorized that the Oort cloud of comets could cross the path of our solar
system every 26 million years, and would possibly rain comets on our planet
for a few million years.
 Conclusion
There has been no settlement to the issue so far,
and no clear one is foreseeable but many astronomers
and physicists favour this hypothesis. Two major problems
with the issue are that it is not easy to prove (test)
causation and that most of the ages of the rocks that
different evidence comes from are questionable. It is not
certain whether there is a gradual decline in the global
fossil record, or if there was a sudden catastrophe;
some studies in some areas show evidence pointing
to different answers.