https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-h

A jumble of fossilized freshwater fish, trees and marine ammonites from North Dakota appear to be from the day an asteroid created the giant Chicxulub crater, wiping out most of the living things on the planet. The mix of land and sea organisms, all bundled into one site, appear to have been killed by a tsunami triggered by seismic waves radiating from the impact. Even though dinosaurs found at this site have not been definitively tied to the event, the site may tell us more about the last mass extinction than any other.

At the end of the Cretaceous Era, the middle of what is now North America was covered by the Western Interior Seaway. At Tanis, North Dakota, University of Kansas PhD student Robert DePalma has found a mix of marine and terrestrial fossils that appear to have been dumped there by cataclysmic waves from the nearby seaway. DePalma thinks these were not tsunamis arriving from the Gulf, but standing waves called seiches triggered in the seaway by seismic waves within minutes of impact.

In a paper to be published in Proceedings Of the National Academy of Science tomorrow, DePalma reports the gills of more than half the suspension-feeding fish buried at Tanis contain tiny droplets of glass that are among the identifying features of large asteroid strikes. The heaped fossils are topped by a cap of material with the high concentration of iridium, the metal whose worldwide distribution first alerted geologists to the fact an asteroid hit the Earth at this time. The site was apparently undisturbed by scavengers, as would normally happen with such a larger shallow burial, suggesting few survived.

Together these findings create a picture of a rain of ejected material sweeping the continent less than two hours after the asteroid hit, followed by walls of water least 10 meters (33 feet) high. The debris from both was buried under a heavier rain of asteroid-induced rock and ash from the consequent fires.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge,” DePalma said in a statement.

Co-author David Burnham added: “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions – they’re not crushed… We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.”

Several of the fish specimens found at Tanis, in the aptly named Hell Creek formation, are thought to be from previously unknown species.

For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

The same site has produced a Triceratops and hadrosaur. Neither’s death has yet been definitively tied to the impact, but the authors argue their presence in rocks of similar age shows these species, if not the individuals, were alive when the asteroid hit.

DePalma is fully aware of the significance of his claim “As human beings, we descended from a lineage that literally survived in the ashes of what was once the glorious kingdom of the dinosaurs,” he said. “And we’re the only species on the planet that has ever been capable of learning from such an event to the benefit of ourselves and every other organism in our world.”

Thanks. URL:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-hit/

I’d like to read the scientific paper, which has yet to be published…

Michael V said:

Thanks. URL:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-hit/

I’d like to read the scientific paper, which has yet to be published…

Sorry missed the end of the link

Cymek said:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-h

A jumble of fossilized freshwater fish, trees and marine ammonites from North Dakota appear to be from the day an asteroid created the giant Chicxulub crater, wiping out most of the living things on the planet. The mix of land and sea organisms, all bundled into one site, appear to have been killed by a tsunami triggered by seismic waves radiating from the impact. Even though dinosaurs found at this site have not been definitively tied to the event, the site may tell us more about the last mass extinction than any other.

At the end of the Cretaceous Era, the middle of what is now North America was covered by the Western Interior Seaway. At Tanis, North Dakota, University of Kansas PhD student Robert DePalma has found a mix of marine and terrestrial fossils that appear to have been dumped there by cataclysmic waves from the nearby seaway. DePalma thinks these were not tsunamis arriving from the Gulf, but standing waves called seiches triggered in the seaway by seismic waves within minutes of impact.

In a paper to be published in Proceedings Of the National Academy of Science tomorrow, DePalma reports the gills of more than half the suspension-feeding fish buried at Tanis contain tiny droplets of glass that are among the identifying features of large asteroid strikes. The heaped fossils are topped by a cap of material with the high concentration of iridium, the metal whose worldwide distribution first alerted geologists to the fact an asteroid hit the Earth at this time. The site was apparently undisturbed by scavengers, as would normally happen with such a larger shallow burial, suggesting few survived.

Together these findings create a picture of a rain of ejected material sweeping the continent less than two hours after the asteroid hit, followed by walls of water least 10 meters (33 feet) high. The debris from both was buried under a heavier rain of asteroid-induced rock and ash from the consequent fires.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge,” DePalma said in a statement.

Co-author David Burnham added: “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions – they’re not crushed… We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.”

Several of the fish specimens found at Tanis, in the aptly named Hell Creek formation, are thought to be from previously unknown species.

For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

The same site has produced a Triceratops and hadrosaur. Neither’s death has yet been definitively tied to the impact, but the authors argue their presence in rocks of similar age shows these species, if not the individuals, were alive when the asteroid hit.

DePalma is fully aware of the significance of his claim “As human beings, we descended from a lineage that literally survived in the ashes of what was once the glorious kingdom of the dinosaurs,” he said. “And we’re the only species on the planet that has ever been capable of learning from such an event to the benefit of ourselves and every other organism in our world.”

> For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

> Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

Hell (Creek formation) yes !

I have been a volcano advocate, but it looks like I need to change that. Perhaps the volcano wiped out the dinosaurs on the Indian half of the globe (Gondwana) and the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on the American half of the globe (Laurasia).

I would be extremely interested to get a complete list of fossil species from that site.

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-h

A jumble of fossilized freshwater fish, trees and marine ammonites from North Dakota appear to be from the day an asteroid created the giant Chicxulub crater, wiping out most of the living things on the planet. The mix of land and sea organisms, all bundled into one site, appear to have been killed by a tsunami triggered by seismic waves radiating from the impact. Even though dinosaurs found at this site have not been definitively tied to the event, the site may tell us more about the last mass extinction than any other.

At the end of the Cretaceous Era, the middle of what is now North America was covered by the Western Interior Seaway. At Tanis, North Dakota, University of Kansas PhD student Robert DePalma has found a mix of marine and terrestrial fossils that appear to have been dumped there by cataclysmic waves from the nearby seaway. DePalma thinks these were not tsunamis arriving from the Gulf, but standing waves called seiches triggered in the seaway by seismic waves within minutes of impact.

In a paper to be published in Proceedings Of the National Academy of Science tomorrow, DePalma reports the gills of more than half the suspension-feeding fish buried at Tanis contain tiny droplets of glass that are among the identifying features of large asteroid strikes. The heaped fossils are topped by a cap of material with the high concentration of iridium, the metal whose worldwide distribution first alerted geologists to the fact an asteroid hit the Earth at this time. The site was apparently undisturbed by scavengers, as would normally happen with such a larger shallow burial, suggesting few survived.

Together these findings create a picture of a rain of ejected material sweeping the continent less than two hours after the asteroid hit, followed by walls of water least 10 meters (33 feet) high. The debris from both was buried under a heavier rain of asteroid-induced rock and ash from the consequent fires.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge,” DePalma said in a statement.

Co-author David Burnham added: “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions – they’re not crushed… We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.”

Several of the fish specimens found at Tanis, in the aptly named Hell Creek formation, are thought to be from previously unknown species.

For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

The same site has produced a Triceratops and hadrosaur. Neither’s death has yet been definitively tied to the impact, but the authors argue their presence in rocks of similar age shows these species, if not the individuals, were alive when the asteroid hit.

DePalma is fully aware of the significance of his claim “As human beings, we descended from a lineage that literally survived in the ashes of what was once the glorious kingdom of the dinosaurs,” he said. “And we’re the only species on the planet that has ever been capable of learning from such an event to the benefit of ourselves and every other organism in our world.”

> For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

> Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

Hell (Creek formation) yes !

I have been a volcano advocate, but it looks like I need to change that. Perhaps the volcano wiped out the dinosaurs on the Indian half of the globe (Gondwana) and the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on the American half of the globe (Laurasia).

I would be extremely interested to get a complete list of fossil species from that site.

I imagine two such events occurring together would be quite severe to anything living

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-h

A jumble of fossilized freshwater fish, trees and marine ammonites from North Dakota appear to be from the day an asteroid created the giant Chicxulub crater, wiping out most of the living things on the planet. The mix of land and sea organisms, all bundled into one site, appear to have been killed by a tsunami triggered by seismic waves radiating from the impact. Even though dinosaurs found at this site have not been definitively tied to the event, the site may tell us more about the last mass extinction than any other.

At the end of the Cretaceous Era, the middle of what is now North America was covered by the Western Interior Seaway. At Tanis, North Dakota, University of Kansas PhD student Robert DePalma has found a mix of marine and terrestrial fossils that appear to have been dumped there by cataclysmic waves from the nearby seaway. DePalma thinks these were not tsunamis arriving from the Gulf, but standing waves called seiches triggered in the seaway by seismic waves within minutes of impact.

In a paper to be published in Proceedings Of the National Academy of Science tomorrow, DePalma reports the gills of more than half the suspension-feeding fish buried at Tanis contain tiny droplets of glass that are among the identifying features of large asteroid strikes. The heaped fossils are topped by a cap of material with the high concentration of iridium, the metal whose worldwide distribution first alerted geologists to the fact an asteroid hit the Earth at this time. The site was apparently undisturbed by scavengers, as would normally happen with such a larger shallow burial, suggesting few survived.

Together these findings create a picture of a rain of ejected material sweeping the continent less than two hours after the asteroid hit, followed by walls of water least 10 meters (33 feet) high. The debris from both was buried under a heavier rain of asteroid-induced rock and ash from the consequent fires.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge,” DePalma said in a statement.

Co-author David Burnham added: “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions – they’re not crushed… We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.”

Several of the fish specimens found at Tanis, in the aptly named Hell Creek formation, are thought to be from previously unknown species.

For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

The same site has produced a Triceratops and hadrosaur. Neither’s death has yet been definitively tied to the impact, but the authors argue their presence in rocks of similar age shows these species, if not the individuals, were alive when the asteroid hit.

DePalma is fully aware of the significance of his claim “As human beings, we descended from a lineage that literally survived in the ashes of what was once the glorious kingdom of the dinosaurs,” he said. “And we’re the only species on the planet that has ever been capable of learning from such an event to the benefit of ourselves and every other organism in our world.”

> For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

> Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

Hell (Creek formation) yes !

I have been a volcano advocate, but it looks like I need to change that. Perhaps the volcano wiped out the dinosaurs on the Indian half of the globe (Gondwana) and the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on the American half of the globe (Laurasia).

I would be extremely interested to get a complete list of fossil species from that site.

Your wish is granted – at least for the whole Hell Creek Formation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/incredible-treasure-trove-of-fossils-seems-to-be-from-the-day-the-dinokilling-asteroid-h

> For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

> Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

Hell (Creek formation) yes !

I have been a volcano advocate, but it looks like I need to change that. Perhaps the volcano wiped out the dinosaurs on the Indian half of the globe (Gondwana) and the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on the American half of the globe (Laurasia).

I would be extremely interested to get a complete list of fossil species from that site.

Your wish is granted – at least for the whole Hell Creek Formation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

Hey, thanks. Even the invertebrates.

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

> For 30 years the theory an asteroid strike led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (birds aside) has dominated the public imagination and convinced most scientists. However, a smaller group of geologists and paleontologists attribute the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions in India. Certainly, these transformed the world’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years either side of the asteroid strike, and may have been of even more planetary significance.

> Timing is key to this dispute. Volcano advocates argue the absence of dinosaur fossils from rocks laid down immediately below the asteroid debris indicates they were already gone by then. This is why DePalma’s claim has hit the paleontological world with the metaphorical force of the asteroid itself.

Hell (Creek formation) yes !

I have been a volcano advocate, but it looks like I need to change that. Perhaps the volcano wiped out the dinosaurs on the Indian half of the globe (Gondwana) and the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs on the American half of the globe (Laurasia).

I would be extremely interested to get a complete list of fossil species from that site.

Your wish is granted – at least for the whole Hell Creek Formation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

Hey, thanks. Even the invertebrates.

Hold on. That list includes a full 60 species of mammals living at the time of the last dinosaurs. Compare that with only 34 species of dinosaurs.

So by the end of the mesozoic, dinosaurs were already in a minority. At Hell Creek.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

Your wish is granted – at least for the whole Hell Creek Formation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

Hey, thanks. Even the invertebrates.

Hold on. That list includes a full 60 species of mammals living at the time of the last dinosaurs. Compare that with only 34 species of dinosaurs.

So by the end of the mesozoic, dinosaurs were already in a minority. At Hell Creek.

Don’t think that is a reasonable conclusion as there would many factors that could influence that situation.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Hey, thanks. Even the invertebrates.

Hold on. That list includes a full 60 species of mammals living at the time of the last dinosaurs. Compare that with only 34 species of dinosaurs.

So by the end of the mesozoic, dinosaurs were already in a minority. At Hell Creek.

Don’t think that is a reasonable conclusion as there would many factors that could influence that situation.

Yes. Taphonomy for starters.

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

It’s an important point to bear in mind.

For example, the great majority of pterosaur fossils are associated with coastal environments, a few with lakes etc. But it may well have been the case that pterosaurs were as widely distributed as birds in regard to habitat.

That would be like finding evidence of the existence of birds only from seabirds, with most of the many inland birds just “gone”.

Michael V said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

It’s an important point to bear in mind.

For example, the great majority of pterosaur fossils are associated with coastal environments, a few with lakes etc. But it may well have been the case that pterosaurs were as widely distributed as birds in regard to habitat.

That would be like finding evidence of the existence of birds only from seabirds, with most of the many inland birds just “gone”.

Absolutely. That’s a taphonomy problem.

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

no worries. glad to help.

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

Michael V said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

Plus, people here aren’t going to sell our data to insurance companies.

Except for sibeen. (glares)

dv said:

Michael V said:

Peak Warming Man said:

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

Plus, people here aren’t going to sell our data to insurance companies.

Except for sibeen. (glares)

True and LOL.

:)

Michael V said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

my family don’t post here.

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

Peak Warming Man said:

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

my family don’t post here.

Neither do mine, and they don’t post in Facebook either.

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

Peak Warming Man said:

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

my family don’t post here.

I’m not sure I know your family.

Michael V said:

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

my family don’t post here.

I’m not sure I know your family.

nice people. mostly.

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

ChrispenEvan said:

my family don’t post here.

I’m not sure I know your family.

nice people. mostly.

Are they all as tall as you?

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

ChrispenEvan said:

my family don’t post here.

I’m not sure I know your family.

nice people. mostly.

I’m still not sure I know them.

And we are destroying this thread. I still want to see the scientific paper. PNAS?

Bubblecar said:

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

I’m not sure I know your family.

nice people. mostly.

Are they all as tall as you?

none are as tall as me. nieces are tallish. one sister is tallish. other sister is evil.

Michael V said:

Your wish is granted – at least for the whole Hell Creek Formation…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

mollwollfumble said:

Hey, thanks. Even the invertebrates.

Hold on. That list includes a full 60 species of mammals living at the time of the last dinosaurs. Compare that with only 34 species of dinosaurs.

So by the end of the mesozoic, dinosaurs were already in a minority. At Hell Creek.

> That would be like finding evidence of the existence of birds only from seabirds, with most of the many inland birds just “gone”.

> Yes. Taphonomy for starters.

Had to look that up. “The branch of palaeontology that deals with the processes of fossilization.” Well, that is the point, large bones (eg. dinosaurs) are more likely to survive better than small ones (eg. mammals). So by number of species, mammals are likely to have been even more dominant.

The present age has been termed the age of insects, based on number of species (not biomass, which is dominated by angiosperms), so the Maastrictian could be termed the age of mammals.

Michael V said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phosphatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

> The circumstances under which bones make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances.

Yes and no. Under neutral and acidic conditions, bones don’t last at all. Under alkaline conditions, they survive quite well.

> a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now

Absolutely.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Creek_Formation

Dang wikipedia doesn’t give the start date for the Hell Creek Formation (PS, I’ve now edited wikipedia so that it does). Does it extend back into the Campanian? Scholar Google suggests not. From https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis/552/ “In many places, tuff deposits from the base of the Hell Creek Formation have proved difficult to date because of detrital potassium feldspars which misrepresent the age of the limited volcanic material. Because of this, determining exactly when Hell Creek deposition began is problematic.” “The Hell Creek Formation in this area is 92.1m thick”. Aha. End date 65.5 Ma, start date 67.5 Ma. 90 m of deposition in only 2 million years, that’s rapid. That’s nowhere near the whole of the Maastrictian, which extends much further back to 72.1 Ma.

What else can I get from looking up the hyperlinks on that wikipedia page?

“The formation contains evidence of what might be the effects of the Chicxulub meteorite impact such as the chaotic mixing of fossil carcasses and a layer of glass tektites with associated impact impressions”, links to three sources.

Shadwell, Talia (2019-03-30). “Prehistoric ‘killing field’ full of dinosaur fossils ‘proves meteorite theory’ France-Presse, Agence (2019-04-01). “Found: fossil ‘mother lode’ created by asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs”. The Guardian. Broad, William J.; Chang, Kenneth (2019-03-29). “Fossil Site Reveals Day That Meteor Hit Earth and, Maybe, Wiped Out Dinosaurs”. The New York Times.

Oh, just newspaper articles.

So let’s count species:
Invertebrates …

Michael V said:

ChrispenEvan said:

Michael V said:

Yeah. We have quite a few experts in different areas. Who needs Facebook, when we have this as our social medium?

my family don’t post here.

I’m not sure I know your family.

They are probably really nice people.

“Incredible Treasure Trove Of Fossils Seems To Be From The DAY The Dino-Killing Asteroid Hit”

April Fool

I can’t believe that I fell for this.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

more in depth.

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

more in depth.

I’m confused.

Moll’s April Fools joke is dated 31 March, and this one is dated next week.

The Rev Dodgson said:

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

more in depth.

I’m confused.

Moll’s April Fools joke is dated 31 March, and this one is dated next week.

yes, i noticed that at the bottom. but i posted that to other forii on march 30th.

The Rev Dodgson said:

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

more in depth.

I’m confused.

Moll’s April Fools joke is dated 31 March, and this one is dated next week.

moll’s joke. I noticed that newspaper articles about the find are dated anywhere between 30 March and 1 April.

But it would make a good April Fool’s day joke, wouldn’t it. Especially as there is not yet any technical article to back it up.

Here’s a bit more about it, with nice drone footage of the site-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-02/research-into-the-day-the-dinosaurs-died/10960446

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

more in depth.

I’m confused.

Moll’s April Fools joke is dated 31 March, and this one is dated next week.

moll’s joke. I noticed that newspaper articles about the find are dated anywhere between 30 March and 1 April.

But it would make a good April Fool’s day joke, wouldn’t it. Especially as there is not yet any technical article to back it up.

After posting I noticed that the actual technical paper was due to be published on 1st, so maybe you were right after all.

I’m not sure about the article from next week though.

mollwollfumble said:

“Incredible Treasure Trove Of Fossils Seems To Be From The DAY The Dino-Killing Asteroid Hit”

April Fool

I can’t believe that I fell for this.

Well if it’s a joke, they’ve hidden it very well. I doubt Walter Alvarez would put his name (he wrote the paper) to a joke that could wipe out a life-time of his work.

The published paper:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116

A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota

Robert A. DePalma, Jan Smit, David A. Burnham, Klaudia Kuiper, Phillip L. Manning, Anton Oleinik, Peter Larson, Florentin J. Maurrasse, Johan Vellekoop, Mark A. Richards, Loren Gurche, and Walter Alvarez

PNAS published ahead of print April 1, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817407116

Edited by Henry J. Melosh, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, and approved February 22, 2019 (received for review October 10, 2018)

It’s also not funny. Although this is a remarkable find, there is nothing hilariously implausible about it. Given that this has been published in a major journal, if they are going to pull a prank like this, I’d expect them to flag it very clearly, e.g. the article ends with a description of the dragon and unicorn fossils they found. This looks for all the world like a serious journal article.

Original paper (see my previous post):

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116

Also:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2198347-incredible-fossil-find-may-be-first-victims-of-dino-killer-asteroid/

dv said:

It’s also not funny. Although this is a remarkable find, there is nothing hilariously implausible about it. Given that this has been published in a major journal, if they are going to pull a prank like this, I’d expect them to flag it very clearly, e.g. the article ends with a description of the dragon and unicorn fossils they found. This looks for all the world like a serious journal article.

Nods.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

I’m confused.

Moll’s April Fools joke is dated 31 March, and this one is dated next week.

moll’s joke. I noticed that newspaper articles about the find are dated anywhere between 30 March and 1 April.

But it would make a good April Fool’s day joke, wouldn’t it. Especially as there is not yet any technical article to back it up.

After posting I noticed that the actual technical paper was due to be published on 1st, so maybe you were right after all.

I’m not sure about the article from next week though.

Four references have turned up in wikipedia now, all newspaper articles, dated 28/3, 29/3, 30/3, 1/4.

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

The following is a very brief summary of the New Yorker article.

“A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere.”

“the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere. An inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan.”

“One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years.”

“On August 5, 2013, I received an email from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues. It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via email. At first, I was skeptical. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself.”

“In 2012, on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. As soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!”

“He began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.”

“An expert says: “I’m suspicious of the findings. They’ve been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims. He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.” As an example, he brought up DePalma’s paper on Dakotaraptor, which he described as “bones he basically collected, all in one area, some of which were part of a dinosaur, some of which were part of a turtle, and he put it all together as a skeleton of one animal.” He also objected to what he felt was excessive secrecy surrounding the Tanis site, which has made it hard for outside scientists to evaluate DePalma’s claims.”

“DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

“This article appears in the print edition of the April 8, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Day the Earth Died.””

Well I think we have now established pretty well that:
- The original paper and associated articles were not jokes.
- Moll’s comment that they were jokes was a joke.

The Rev D’s motives and meaning remain unclear however.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Well I think we have now established pretty well that:
- The original paper and associated articles were not jokes.
- Moll’s comment that they were jokes was a joke.

The Rev D’s motives and meaning remain unclear however.

Good one, Moll.

mollwollfumble said:

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

geeez been linking to that article for 4 days. here, sssf fb page, science talk, truth fb page and, science talk fb page.

ChrispenEvan said:

mollwollfumble said:

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

geeez been linking to that article for 4 days. here, sssf fb page, science talk, truth fb page and, science talk fb page.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, mollwolfumble

dv said:

ChrispenEvan said:

mollwollfumble said:

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

geeez been linking to that article for 4 days. here, sssf fb page, science talk, truth fb page and, science talk fb page.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, mollwolfumble

….and your dog!

I didn’t even think of it as an April Fools joke certainly didn’t post if for the reason

Michael V said:

Original paper (see my earlier post):

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116

Also:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2198347-incredible-fossil-find-may-be-first-victims-of-dino-killer-asteroid/

The doi link works now:

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817407116

Peak Warming Man said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Be aware that hardly any vertebrates are fossilised. Phospatic bones just don’t last. The circumstances under which they make enduring fossils can be considered freak circumstances. Of those fossils that were created, only a fraction survived to the present , as whole formations have been eroded to nothing: there would be large clades of animals with literally no existing record here in the modern era. And of those fossils that do exist, a tiny fraction are close to the surface right now such that they are available to be found by humans at this time, and of those only a small fraction have been discovered.

Still – finding fish with glassy microtektites in their gills at the Ir-bearing K-Pg boundary layer is quite extraordinary. Especially as this is the place where the Alvarezes first found the Ir-anomaly.

I so much want to see the original paper (not yet published).

There’s still a lot of insight and knowledge to be had in this little backwater forum.

Of course there is. We are special.

:)

I wonder what percentage of something living ends up as a fossil, one in a billion perhaps.
Will fossil from today exist millions of years later or have humans stopped this process occurring.

Cymek said:

I wonder what percentage of something living ends up as a fossil, one in a billion perhaps.
Will fossil from today exist millions of years later or have humans stopped this process occurring.

Basically all you need to get a fossil, is to have the body quickly covered in sediment and reduced oxygen and left reasonably undisturbed for a few million years.

PermeateFree said:

Cymek said:

I wonder what percentage of something living ends up as a fossil, one in a billion perhaps.
Will fossil from today exist millions of years later or have humans stopped this process occurring.

Basically all you need to get a fossil, is to have the body quickly covered in sediment and reduced oxygen and left reasonably undisturbed for a few million years.

or falls into a peat bog.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

moll’s joke. I noticed that newspaper articles about the find are dated anywhere between 30 March and 1 April.

But it would make a good April Fool’s day joke, wouldn’t it. Especially as there is not yet any technical article to back it up.

After posting I noticed that the actual technical paper was due to be published on 1st, so maybe you were right after all.

I’m not sure about the article from next week though.

Four references have turned up in wikipedia now, all newspaper articles, dated 28/3, 29/3, 30/3, 1/4.

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

The following is a very brief summary of the New Yorker article.

“A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere.”

“the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere. An inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan.”

“One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years.”

“On August 5, 2013, I received an email from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues. It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via email. At first, I was skeptical. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself.”

“In 2012, on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. As soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!”

“He began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.”

“An expert says: “I’m suspicious of the findings. They’ve been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims. He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.” As an example, he brought up DePalma’s paper on Dakotaraptor, which he described as “bones he basically collected, all in one area, some of which were part of a dinosaur, some of which were part of a turtle, and he put it all together as a skeleton of one animal.” He also objected to what he felt was excessive secrecy surrounding the Tanis site, which has made it hard for outside scientists to evaluate DePalma’s claims.”

“DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

“This article appears in the print edition of the April 8, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Day the Earth Died.””

Read the article, a very interesting an informative read. It also shows how harsh and even cruel those in higher positions can be.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

After posting I noticed that the actual technical paper was due to be published on 1st, so maybe you were right after all.

I’m not sure about the article from next week though.

Four references have turned up in wikipedia now, all newspaper articles, dated 28/3, 29/3, 30/3, 1/4.

The 28/3 one is worth reading for background. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

The following is a very brief summary of the New Yorker article.

“A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere.”

“the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere. An inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan.”

“One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years.”

“On August 5, 2013, I received an email from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues. It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via email. At first, I was skeptical. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself.”

“In 2012, on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. As soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!”

“He began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.”

“An expert says: “I’m suspicious of the findings. They’ve been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims. He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.” As an example, he brought up DePalma’s paper on Dakotaraptor, which he described as “bones he basically collected, all in one area, some of which were part of a dinosaur, some of which were part of a turtle, and he put it all together as a skeleton of one animal.” He also objected to what he felt was excessive secrecy surrounding the Tanis site, which has made it hard for outside scientists to evaluate DePalma’s claims.”

“DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

“This article appears in the print edition of the April 8, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Day the Earth Died.””

Read the article, a very interesting an informative read. It also shows how harsh and even cruel those in higher positions can be.

It is and an exciting find for the man in question

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

Cymek said:

I wonder what percentage of something living ends up as a fossil, one in a billion perhaps.
Will fossil from today exist millions of years later or have humans stopped this process occurring.

Basically all you need to get a fossil, is to have the body quickly covered in sediment and reduced oxygen and left reasonably undisturbed for a few million years.

or falls into a peat bog.

Much the same thing.

PermeateFree said:

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

Basically all you need to get a fossil, is to have the body quickly covered in sediment and reduced oxygen and left reasonably undisturbed for a few million years.

or falls into a peat bog.

Much the same thing.

I was thinking us humans might dig up the areas before they become fossilised

Cymek said:

PermeateFree said:

roughbarked said:

or falls into a peat bog.

Much the same thing.

I was thinking us humans might dig up the areas before they become fossilised

No. Even if we dig up and over everything, water-settled terrestrial and marine sediments provide plenty of taphonomic niches (eg: lakes, flood-plains, ox-bows, rivers, oceans). There’s a few others, but they are unusual, so I’ll leave them alone.

Michael V said:

Cymek said:

PermeateFree said:

Much the same thing.

I was thinking us humans might dig up the areas before they become fossilised

No. Even if we dig up and over everything, water-settled terrestrial and marine sediments provide plenty of taphonomic niches (eg: lakes, flood-plains, ox-bows, rivers, oceans). There’s a few others, but they are unusual, so I’ll leave them alone.

It would be an interesting alternative type of burial for humans a process to reasonable ensure you become fossilised, perhaps to one day be dug up by something

Cymek said:

PermeateFree said:

roughbarked said:

or falls into a peat bog.

Much the same thing.

I was thinking us humans might dig up the areas before they become fossilised

Too much to dig up even for us. Not a lot you can do with fine sediment except grow stuff in it. We will probably also be well gone before the sediment turned to stone.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/australian-farmer-saving-fossils-some-planet-s-weirdest-most-ancient-creatures

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/australian-farmer-saving-fossils-some-planet-s-weirdest-most-ancient-creatures

Ah yes, the Nilpena addition to Ediacara Conservation Park.

> “DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

Let’s suppose that DePalma is wrong, and I’m not saying he is, then what are the alternatives?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the microtektites are genuine, they look real to me. And i’m perfectly willing to accept that the deposit came from a flood.

But what if this is a series of river floods rather than a tsunami? That seems more reasonable. Then the deposit could be a mixture of river fish deposited in the flood and microtektites and other fossils that have been eroded from earlier deposits. This deposit sits on top of the Hell Creek Formation bedrock. Being really soft, unconsolidated material it could even be as recent as 10,000 years old. The way to tell would be to look closely at the fossilised fish species, or to do a carbon dating on the vegetation.

mollwollfumble said:

> “DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

Let’s suppose that DePalma is wrong, and I’m not saying he is, then what are the alternatives?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the microtektites are genuine, they look real to me. And i’m perfectly willing to accept that the deposit came from a flood.

But what if this is a series of river floods rather than a tsunami? That seems more reasonable. Then the deposit could be a mixture of river fish deposited in the flood and microtektites and other fossils that have been eroded from earlier deposits. This deposit sits on top of the Hell Creek Formation bedrock. Being really soft, unconsolidated material it could even be as recent as 10,000 years old. The way to tell would be to look closely at the fossilised fish species, or to do a carbon dating on the vegetation.

The tsunami I think would have been moving considerable faster than 100 miles an hour. The impact site is directly South of the Mississippi River, which leads in an almost direct line to Hell Creek. Remember, that impact was the largest since life began on the planet, it was huge and I would imagine everything connected to it would have been extra-ordinary to put it mildly.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

> “DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

Let’s suppose that DePalma is wrong, and I’m not saying he is, then what are the alternatives?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the microtektites are genuine, they look real to me. And i’m perfectly willing to accept that the deposit came from a flood.

But what if this is a series of river floods rather than a tsunami? That seems more reasonable. Then the deposit could be a mixture of river fish deposited in the flood and microtektites and other fossils that have been eroded from earlier deposits. This deposit sits on top of the Hell Creek Formation bedrock. Being really soft, unconsolidated material it could even be as recent as 10,000 years old. The way to tell would be to look closely at the fossilised fish species, or to do a carbon dating on the vegetation.

The tsunami I think would have been moving considerable faster than 100 miles an hour. The impact site is directly South of the Mississippi River, which leads in an almost direct line to Hell Creek. Remember, that impact was the largest since life began on the planet, it was huge and I would imagine everything connected to it would have been extra-ordinary to put it mildly.

PermeateFree said:

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

> “DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

Let’s suppose that DePalma is wrong, and I’m not saying he is, then what are the alternatives?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the microtektites are genuine, they look real to me. And i’m perfectly willing to accept that the deposit came from a flood.

But what if this is a series of river floods rather than a tsunami? That seems more reasonable. Then the deposit could be a mixture of river fish deposited in the flood and microtektites and other fossils that have been eroded from earlier deposits. This deposit sits on top of the Hell Creek Formation bedrock. Being really soft, unconsolidated material it could even be as recent as 10,000 years old. The way to tell would be to look closely at the fossilised fish species, or to do a carbon dating on the vegetation.

The tsunami I think would have been moving considerable faster than 100 miles an hour. The impact site is directly South of the Mississippi River, which leads in an almost direct line to Hell Creek. Remember, that impact was the largest since life began on the planet, it was huge and I would imagine everything connected to it would have been extra-ordinary to put it mildly.

>>The asteroid seared through the sky at more than 40 times the speed of sound and slammed into the Earth’s crust. It produced an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, roughly seven billion times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

The plunge into the Earth’s crust sent shock waves across the landscape.

Tsunamis between 100 and 300m high surged across the Gulf of Mexico and ripped up the seafloor down to depths of 500m. Magnitude-10 earthquakes destroyed the coastline and the radiating air blast flattened any forests within thousands of kilometres. Finally, tons of rock showered from the sky, burying any remaining life.<<

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160415-what-really-happened-when-the-dino-killer-asteroid-struck

>>A tsunami is a type of tidal wave caused by sudden movements of water(displacement). They can reach speeds of up to 800km/h, grow toover 30 m inheight and travel right across the Pacific. They are one of the world’s most dangerous natural disasters, having calamitous effects on coastal communities.<<

https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/~/media/shared/documents/education%20and%20careers/Resources/FactSheets/Tsunamis%20Factsheet%20v2.pdf?la=en

PermeateFree said:

PermeateFree said:

PermeateFree said:

The tsunami I think would have been moving considerable faster than 100 miles an hour. The impact site is directly South of the Mississippi River, which leads in an almost direct line to Hell Creek. Remember, that impact was the largest since life began on the planet, it was huge and I would imagine everything connected to it would have been extra-ordinary to put it mildly.

>>The asteroid seared through the sky at more than 40 times the speed of sound and slammed into the Earth’s crust. It produced an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, roughly seven billion times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

The plunge into the Earth’s crust sent shock waves across the landscape.

Tsunamis between 100 and 300m high surged across the Gulf of Mexico and ripped up the seafloor down to depths of 500m. Magnitude-10 earthquakes destroyed the coastline and the radiating air blast flattened any forests within thousands of kilometres. Finally, tons of rock showered from the sky, burying any remaining life.<<

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160415-what-really-happened-when-the-dino-killer-asteroid-struck

>>A tsunami is a type of tidal wave caused by sudden movements of water(displacement). They can reach speeds of up to 800km/h, grow toover 30 m inheight and travel right across the Pacific. They are one of the world’s most dangerous natural disasters, having calamitous effects on coastal communities.<<

https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/~/media/shared/documents/education%20and%20careers/Resources/FactSheets/Tsunamis%20Factsheet%20v2.pdf?la=en

Although sea levels had dropped between 101 to 66 million years ago, they were still considerably higher than today. However the map does show the flat area of the old shallow sea (Skull Creek Seaway) and where the tsunami would have likely traveled (directly) to the Hell Creek area.

https://dinopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Albian

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

> “DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis.”

Let’s suppose that DePalma is wrong, and I’m not saying he is, then what are the alternatives?

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the microtektites are genuine, they look real to me. And i’m perfectly willing to accept that the deposit came from a flood.

But what if this is a series of river floods rather than a tsunami? That seems more reasonable. Then the deposit could be a mixture of river fish deposited in the flood and microtektites and other fossils that have been eroded from earlier deposits. This deposit sits on top of the Hell Creek Formation bedrock. Being really soft, unconsolidated material it could even be as recent as 10,000 years old. The way to tell would be to look closely at the fossilised fish species, or to do a carbon dating on the vegetation.

The tsunami I think would have been moving considerable faster than 100 miles an hour. The impact site is directly South of the Mississippi River, which leads in an almost direct line to Hell Creek. Remember, that impact was the largest since life began on the planet, it was huge and I would imagine everything connected to it would have been extra-ordinary to put it mildly.

Thanks. Extremely interesting. The triple problem still remains that the tsunami wouldn’t have been high enough at that distance, and that the microtektites were found at the top of the deposit whereas they should have arrived first, and that the sediments are unconsolidated whereas at that age they should have been turned to rock like the rest of the Hell Creek Formation.

But DePalma’s idea certainly could be true.

Seiche waves, not tsunami. Different beasts.

Please note: Hell Ck Fm and Formations in the Badlands are very soft, easily eroded, poorly lithified rocks. It’s the reason behind that odd-looking landscape.

I thought I had read that there were marine fossils, laid down at the same time. So where did they come from if not the sea? Also the Hell Creek region would have been where the land began to rise (The Mississippi basin has a very gradual fall), which would mean the much of debris washed up by the tsunami would be left there, thereby condensing the fossils to this area and the soil might have remained more friable due to lack of further compaction from the low area rainfall. The impact zone is not that far away and in a direct and clear line.

PermeateFree said:

I thought I had read that there were marine fossils, laid down at the same time. So where did they come from if not the sea? Also the Hell Creek region would have been where the land began to rise (The Mississippi basin has a very gradual fall), which would mean the much of debris washed up by the tsunami would be left there, thereby condensing the fossils to this area and the soil might have remained more friable due to lack of further compaction from the low area rainfall. The impact zone is not that far away and in a direct and clear line.

A bit garbled with too many commas, but I’m sure you can get the meaning.