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Science

Scientists Find 66-Million-Year-Old Fossils From The Day The Dinosaurs Died (usatoday.com) 114

Posted by EditorDavid from the land-of-the-lost dept.
"It's like a time capsule of the end of the world," reports USA Today: 66 million years ago, in what's now North Dakota, a group of animals died together, only a few minutes after a huge asteroid smashed into the Earth near present-day Mexico. Scientists Friday announced the discovery of the jumbled, fossilized remains of the animals, all killed when a tsunami-like wave and a torrent of rocks, sand and glass buried them alive.

This graveyard of fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur is a unique, first-of-its-kind discovery from the exact day that life on Earth changed forever, according to the study lead author Robert DePalma, a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History... DePalma added that the find provides spectacular new detail to what is perhaps the most important event to ever affect life on Earth... The asteroid impact and resulting mass extinction, which scientists call the K-T boundary, marked the end of the Cretaceous Era. The aftereffects of that infamous asteroid collision killed 75 percent of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. It's the planet's most recent mass extinction.
Scientists believe the asteroid was 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) wide, the BBC reports, and that it "hurled billions of tonnes of molten and vaporised rock into the sky in all directions - and across thousands of kilometres." DePalma argues that moment "is tied directly to all of us -- to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet.

"Nothing was the same after that impact. It became a planet of mammals rather than a planet of dinosaurs."
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Scientists Find 66-Million-Year-Old Fossils From The Day The Dinosaurs Died More

Scientists Find 66-Million-Year-Old Fossils From The Day The Dinosaurs Died

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  • Current extinction event.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashkitty ( 21637 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @11:54AM (#58361674) Homepage
    Aren't we in the middle of a current mass extinction event? Only 12 more years to go.
    • Follow up: https://www.livescience.com/47... [livescience.com] Life Science article on current mass extinction event.

  • If legit, it is the paleo find of the century (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:04PM (#58361718)
    Just finding amber-preserved tektites is a huge deal (meaning their chemical signature would be basically the same as it was during the event -- something never before encountered). If there actually are non-reworked dinosaur bones in close proximity to / at the K-T boundary, it would unequivocally prove that the dinosaurs survived all the way up to the asteroid impact, which has been the subject of some debate. DePalma is taking a lot of flak for doing some Barnum-type hyping of the find, and for maintaining extreme secrecy about the location of the site -- as well as for letting journalists release some details that are apparently not included in the peer-reviewed paper (e.g., the existence of said dino bones). But if even part of what is says he has found is true, then it is a truly historic find which will represent a quantum leap in our understanding of the bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and even shed a lot of light for what to expect about similar impacts in the future. Personally, I think that (in addition to his showmanship and relative lack of transparency so far) a lot of the blowback is coming from folks at bigger institutions who are a bit miffed that this find was produced not by their ranks but by a younger, non-Ph.D. paleontologist playing somewhat by his own rules. But big scientific claims require lots of scrutiny, and eventually proof. Let's hope now that the word is out, he eventually puts it all out there for the scientific community to assess.

    • A quantum leap is actually ... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... the smallest physically possible leap. ;)

      (I get you, of course. I just wish there was a better way of saying it.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        It may be the smallest, as you say, but it is noteworthy that a quantum leap also represents being in an entirely new state where aspects of the previous state are not necessarily applicable.

        • an entirely new state where aspects of the previous state are not necessarily applicable.

          So, almost completely the wrong simile then.

          Say the universe has three fossil sites, A, B, and C, each with well-recorded context (associated fossils, well-understood sedimentary and taphnonomic contexts), solid dating. You add a 4th site - this one - with some genuine questions over the details of sedimentology, taphonomy. Does this constitute a "quantum leap"? The existence of the 4th site in no way invalidates the e

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Livius ( 318358 )

        A quantum leap is a leap that cannot be made incrementally.

    • Non-Avian Dinosaurs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BrianMarshall ( 704425 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @01:04PM (#58361914) Homepage
      We still have avian dinosaurs - I have one trying to take apart the thermostat on the wall as I write this. Some of them are pretty smart.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        Get a bird, they said... [twimg.com] ;)

      • Re:Non-Avian Dinosaurs (Score:5, Funny)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @01:27PM (#58362018) Homepage

        I like to picture dinosaurs with the behaviors of modern birds, because it can sometimes be really disturbing. For example, when my amazon gets hormonal, he crouches down, flares all his feathers out, and pulsates his pupils - black-in-yellow, doubling then halving in size every few seconds while he locks his gaze on you... then just randomly, clamps onto the nearest object, no matter what it is, even a piece of steel, and just gnaws down on it again and again, as hard as he can - all the while never breaking his gaze on you. As if you say, "YOU SEE THIS, BUDDY? THIS COULD BE YOU!!!!"

        Now, it's one thing when the animal doing that threat display is a 400 gram fluffball. But picture a Tyrannosaur doing that. Staring you down with pulsating yellow eyes and randomly clamping onto a tree as a threat display.

        • Yeah... I love the Amazon personality. I had a small one - a white-fronted - for 18 years.

          Now, I have a green-cheeked conure. Surprisingly, he is an better talker and, like an Amazon, so inteligent it's scary. One evening when he was a few months old, he realized that "I" and "me" mean the same thing, and he just thought this was wonderful. He was going, "I am me! I am parrot, me! I me me!".

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Rei ( 128717 )

            When my amazon was just a couple months old (4 months I think?), I was trying to get him to stand on this slidey wood ladder thing I had gotten him but which he didn't like. So I hung it from a rope, and then further up the support rope I tied a string (too thin for him to stand on) and hung a treat down, so he'd have to stand on the ladder to reach the treat. I kept coming back though and the treat would be gone, its string up on the support rope. I had thought that my then-spouse was doing it, so I'd re

        • My in-laws have a cockatoo. (They used to own two but one passed away about 15 years ago.) She can be a really sweet bird and love to be petted... until she doesn't. At that point, you'd best take your fingers away from her or you'll wind up missing one. She can crack whole walnuts in one bite and has picked master locks.

          Now, size that up to T-Rex size and add razor sharp teeth. You'd have a highly intelligent dinosaur who's really agitated, sees you as a tasty snack, and who can shred anything you put up t

      • Re:Non-Avian Dinosaurs (Score:5, Funny)

        by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @04:30PM (#58362820)

        He wants you to get a NEST?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @01:26PM (#58362012)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        There is a recent paper with some evidence showing the Chicxulub impact caused the lava outflow from the Deccan Traps to increase [berkeley.edu]. So without the asteroid strike it's possible that many of the species that went extinct could have survived the less severe volcanic activity.

        “Now that we have dated Deccan Traps lava flows in more and different locations, we see that the transition seems to be the same everywhere. I would say, with pretty high confidence, that the eruptions occurred within 50,000 years, and maybe 30,000 years, of the impact, which means they were synchronous within the margin of error,” said Paul Renne, a professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and senior author of the study, which will appear online Feb. 21. “That is an important validation of the hypothesis that the impact renewed lava flows.”

        The new dates also confirm earlier estimates that the lava flows continued for about a million years, but contain a surprise: three-quarters of the lava erupted after the impact. Previous studies suggested that about 80 percent of the lava erupted before the impact...

        Now, with three times more rock samples from areas covering more of the Deccan Traps, the researchers have established that the time of peak eruptions was the same across much of the Indian continent. This supports the group’s hypothesis that the asteroid impact triggered super-earthquakes that caused a strong burst of volcanism in India, which is almost directly opposite the impact site, the Chicxulub crater in the Caribbean Sea.

        • Actually, the paper shows approximate contemporanity. It is only weak evidence for Chixulub causing a change in the rate of eruption in the Deccan Traps.

          Just like with Wegener and his plate tectonics (specifically, his proposed propulsion mechanism, the "Polar Flight"), the proposed mechanism for a triggering is deeply unconvincing. If such small deliveries of seismic energy could trigger a significant change in a volcanic region's plumbing, then we'd have known for millennia that volcanic eruptions are st

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • A planet of mammals? No, a planet of the Lizard People!

    Be sure to vote for the right one next year.

  • Dominionists and fundamentalists will deny it (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Despite any amount of scientific evidence presented and vetted, even if it's by the entire scientific community, the Fundamentalist Christians, Dominionists, and other religious types will claim it's all faked, that science is evil, they're all trying to sway the faithful from God to Satan, and so on, and so forth.
    This is the era we're living in right now: The Age of Anti-Information. The stupid people are getting stupider, and when you challenge their non-truths and delusions, they get violent, vote for p
  • Could it have been the original Ash Wednesday?
    • "Hot Fudge Sundae - which happens on a Tuesday this year," to quote an SF novel about asteroid impact.

  • "The asteroid was 12 kilometers"

    How big was it when it entered the atmosphere? How quickly would it burn? How big was the atmosphere back then?

    • How big was it when it entered the atmosphere?

      12km. The guesstimate isn't based on its size out in space, since we have no way to even imagine getting a clue about that.

      How quickly would it burn?

      Escape speed is 11km/s. Which is the MINIMUM speed it could have been moving relative to the ground. Assuming it was not in a retrograde orbit, and that it was coming from the vicinity of the Asteroid Belt (more likely it came from farther out, possibly even interstellar), we're talking closer to Solar Escape Spe

      • Also:

        Earth's atmosphere is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) thick, but most of it is within 10 miles (16 km) the surface.

        So, if the asteroid was 12km large, then the outer edge of the asteroid was likely in the thinner parts of the atmosphere when the inner edge impacted.

      • except to give you a really spectacular lightshow during the last few minutes of your existance....

        seconds. Small number of seconds.

        Oh, OK, you could allow a three minutes for the shock wave to arrive. But much longer than that and the light show happens well below your local horizon.

  • I can't remember if I cried
    When I read about his widowed bride
    Something touched me deep inside
    The day the dinosaurs died

    • They haven't died yet. In fact, there are more species of dinosaurs alive today than there are mammals, though we're killing both off pretty fast. Eventually, the number of species of dinosaurs and mammals is likely to remain the same - Homo sapiens and Gallus gallus.
  • Of all the news outlets that covered this story this weekend ... USA Today? Really? https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com]

  • t-shirt (Score:2)

    by sad_ ( 7868 )

    check out tfa, if only for one picture;
    you'll see DePalma's assistant wearing a Jurasic Park t-shirt, how cool is that :)

  • I wish that journalists would be expected to know at least a high-school level of science before being detailed to write about scientific discoveries. The K-T boundary does not mark "the end of the Cretacious Era", because there is no such thing. The K-T boundary marks the end of the Cretaceous Period, and also the end of the Mesozoic Era.
    • If you're going to get picky, then the reason that geologists have for some years been moving to describing it as the K-Pg boundary (if they abbreviate it at all) is that the Cretaceous and Palaeogene are the same level of the taxonomy of time units. Or you could talk equivalently about the M-C (Mesozoic-Caenozoic) boundary.

      It didn't make much difference in my geological back yard, not compared to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

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