"Protein quake" denotes the dissipation of excess energy across a protein, in response to a local perturbation such as the breaking of a chemical bond or the absorption of a photon. Femtosecond timeresolved small-and wide-angle X-ray scattering (TR-SWAXS) is capable of tracking such ultrafast protein dynamics. However, because the structural interpretation of the experiments is complicated, a molecular picture of protein quakes has remained elusive. In addition, new questions arose from recent TR-SWAXS data that were interpreted as underdamped oscillations of an entire protein, thus challenging the long-standing concept of overdamped global protein dynamics. Based on molecular-dynamics simulations, we present a detailed molecular movie of the protein quake after carbon monoxide (CO) photodissociation in myoglobin. The simulations suggest that the protein quake is characterized by a single pressure peak that propagates anisotropically within 500 fs across the protein and further into the solvent. By computing TR-SWAXS patterns from the simulations, we could interpret features in the reciprocalspace SWAXS signals as specific real-space dynamics, such as CO displacement and pressure wave propagation. Remarkably, we found that the small-angle data primarily detect modulations of the solvent density but not oscillations of the bare protein, thereby reconciling recent TR-SWAXS experiments with the notion of overdamped global protein dynamics.time-resolved SAXS/WAXS | free-electron laser | molecular dynamics F unctional protein dynamics occur on various timescales, ranging from tens of femtoseconds for bond breaking, up to milliseconds and seconds for large-scale conformational transitions or protein folding. Observing and explaining such transitions, if possible in a time-resolved manner, has remained a central goal of molecular biophysics. A popular model system used to study proteins dynamics has been the 18-kDa protein myoglobin (Mb), the protein of first known tertiary structure (1). Mb contains an iron-porphyrin heme group that reversibly binds small gas molecules such as molecular oxygen (O 2 ) or carbon monoxide (CO). Mb is abundant in the muscle tissue of vertebrates, where it plays an important role in the transport and storage of O 2 and in the biochemistry of nitric oxide (2, 3).Because the CO-iron bonds in a Mb ensemble can be coherently photolysed with a laser flash within only 50 fs (4), a range of time-resolved techniques has been applied to probe various aspects of the structural dynamics after CO photodissociation, such as energy dissipation, CO dynamics, or heme doming (5-15). Three-dimensional movies of Mb conformational transitions were derived by means of time-resolved crystallography, which recently reached subpicosecond time resolution (16-19). These experimental studies were complemented by several pioneering molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations that revealed the Mb dynamics with atomic detail, with some focus on heat dissipation, vibrational dynamics, as well as ligand migration (20-28).Time-re...