NEW MYSTERY OF HOW THE DINOSAURS BECAME EXTINCT UNLOCKED THROUGH NEW FOSSIL DISCOVERY
Consider a catastrophe that killed 75% of all living things on Earth, including dinosaurs. Though it might sound like something from a science fiction or horror film, this is exactly what happened when the Cretaceous period ended abruptly 66 million years ago. The Chicxulub Impactor, an asteroid or comet, is thought to have struck Earth near what is now the Yucatan. In the end, the event severely damaged the planet's biodiversity, but humanity has no idea how the fallout played out. The mystery of the first species to experience the effects of this catastrophic event is now solved thanks to a recent discovery in North Dakota.
A large collection of fossils containing fish and other species has been discovered by a team of paleontologists and geologists. They would have been in the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow body of water that spanned North America at the time of the asteroid strike. Massive standing waves known as seiches, caused by the asteroid's impact, drove the animals all the way to North Dakota within an hour of the disaster. Geologists call the area around Bowman Tanis; it was the mouth of a freshwater river that was teeming with life. The fossils were found by PhD candidate Robert DePalma of the University of Kansas, whose research will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The finding is significant because, up until now, it had been challenging to piece together the precise events that took place during this incident. DePalma provides additional evidence in support of the asteroid theory when she finds glass droplets in roughly half of the fish's gills, a feature common to asteroid strikes. Since iridium was the material that first provided scientists with information about the Chicxulub asteroid, the high concentration of iridium in the material that caps the fossil block is also significant.
Given that it doesn't seem like scavengers had an opportunity to eat the animals, the fossils themselves are in astonishingly good condition. The materials that would have rained down on the planet in the hours following the asteroid strike are most likely to blame for this. Massive water waves that alternated with successive showers of ash and rock from asteroids would have compacted this sediment.
According to co-author David Burnham, "Everything is preserved in three dimensions – they're not crushed because the sedimentation happened so quickly." It collapses almost like a liquid and solidifies like concrete, much like an avalanche. The water's violence claimed their lives quite unexpectedly. One of our fish broke in half after it struck a tree.
The fossils are a wealth of knowledge about the final stages of the Cretaceous period, as they include hundreds of extinct species. Scientists are already using this discovery to fill in the gaps regarding what happened right after this amazing event. Burnham stated, "We know that horrible things happened immediately after the impact, but no one has found this kind of smoking-gun evidence." "We understand that this explosion killed the dinosaurs, but why are there still dead bodies all over the place?" people have asked. Now that we have bodies, okay? Although they are not dinosaurs, I believe those will also be discovered in the future.