The Day the Dinosaurs Died
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
One thing I find remarkable in this story: extensively working in the field (=literally/outside) -- opposed to following conventional "publish or perish" advice advancing his PhD in a more predictable manner...
Unknown of paleontologist spent several years digging up a site which records the K-T impact. Complete with whole fossils, raining debris from the meteor, the whole 9 yards. The site includes a variety of animals, including dinosaurs, who died on that day. We can even place the time of year from the plant fossils.
A well-known science journalist has been to the site and verifies that he isn't making it up.
The paleontologist's working assumption was that it was the result of a tsunami. However it appears instead to be the result of a seiche - the earthquake from the meteor sloshing water back and forth, destroying everything. So the entire site captures the last hour of the K-T zone. (Plus one random mammal that tunneled into the site some time later and died in its burrow.)
This is one of the most important paleontological sites ever found.
In any case, Neil Shubin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik, has posted this comment [1], in which he takes issue with the way the New Yorker article broke an embargo.
[1] https://twitter.com/NeilShubin/status/1111755353295863808
Which, okay, there's a conversation to be had there, but don't mistake it as weakening the importance of the find.
It's possible that the New Yorker has another Jonah Lehrer writing for them. It's possible that this author has conspired with a paleontologist to craft a total fabrication and describe mammal burrows that don't actually exist. It's possible that several other paleontologists are all participating in this fabrication, with the certain knowledge that it will destroy their careers and their reputation before very long.
Or, alternatively, this particular paleontologist happened to be in the right place at the right time, and because of some past experiences, has developed an unconventional approach to handling his discoveries. Other researchers are participating, cautiously at first, and then getting excited by what they find. And, even if the working hypothesis -- that this site is a record of the last hours of the Cretaceous period -- turns out to be false for some reason, everyone is still working in good faith on what will turn out to be a monumentally important find anyway.
It's a tough call, but I'm leaning towards the latter at the moment. Time will tell, I suppose.
It does - because it calls into question the validity of the find.
And what's with the indigenous people non-sequitur? There were no people, indigenous or elsewhere, 60 million years ago.
Enjoy.
That's a shame, it's actually a good article. However, how would you dress if you had to spend hours a day on your belly under the desert sun? Perhaps it's just a practical way to dress and the journalist was just exercising some artistic license?
The piece in the NewYorker makes it look like DePalma's work makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the extinction of the dinosaurs, while the twitter thread (and https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714 cited therein) point out that the actual paper published about the discovery doesn't even mention dinosaours and that DePalma is just acting as "a pulp novel caricature of a paleontologist" following the established script of "Go to the press, get your fame, let the academics argue while the public goes 'Wowwww'". All the while violating the embargo on the paper.
the "actual" paper hasn't been published yet, if you read the article you would see that most of the details have been secret. also this article does mention dinosaurs on two accounts, perhaps the first feathers ever found at hell's creater were found at this digsite as well as the hipbone of another dinosaur
You are being intellectually lazy and superficial by not reading the whole tweet and just discarding the argument at the first instant you see something that grates you if taken out of context.
We’ll see what the facts are as the story develops, but the griping sounds like angry old people wielding their positional power.
The supervisors always have another idea to chase, another task upon which to assign their hardworking protege...
If it is what it claims to be, then hats off and wow, incredible find and a true milestone. But until until the whole process of papper and peers is well under way, I shall take the story with a wagonload of salt.
I'm not a scientist or anything. I'm some guy who took an interest in dating the Cretacious-Paleogene (K-T or KPB or K-Pg, etc.) extinction event last year. My perspective is narrow and biased. But no one seems to be willing to comment on this, so I felt compelled to dig up some information and report. In short: this is real, and it's huge. Read the New Yorker article, and [1].
It's okay to take issue with the way these findings have been presented, but there's no reason to doubt the truth of the claims made in articles about this finding. DePalma is not a well-established scientist, but his collaboraters are respected and influential researchers. Walter Alvarez is probably the second most famous dinosaur researcher alive, having co-created the impact hypothesis in the first place. Jan Smit, while not as prominent in the public eye, is likely the world's leading expert on K-T dating. I have personally also been impressed with the work of Klaudia Kuiper, who has made significant progress over the last two decades in improving the accuracy of radioisotope dating—specifically 40Ar/39Ar, the current most precise method.
These people are not likely to fabricate a finding, much less one which would be instantly discovered when other scientists are allowed to access the site. Alvarez, in addition to already being famous, is 78 year old! Smit is 70 and retired, and shows no attention-seeking behavior as far as I can tell. It's nearly impossible to even find a word written about the man. It's also very unlikely that they would be mistaken about the nature of the find. If conference abstracts are to be believed, then multiple independent lines of evidence point very precisely to this event being associated with the Chicxulub impact. It's worth noting that [3] gives an Ar/Ar date of 66.03 mya for glass shards found at Tanis, which is exceedingly close to dates Kuiper (presumably using the same lab or labs) has found for zircons known to be from the K-T boundary.
People seem to be concerned about there being no actual dinosaurs in the site. Even if you believe fish are boring and only care about land fauna (I will admit to leaning that way myself), marine life is still hugely important for its ability to tell us about the environmental conditions at the time. Likewise for plants: don't you care at all about what the earth looked like as dinosaurs roamed? Listen: we have plenty of dinosaur bones. This site is actually much more valuable than typical beds of large animal skeletons because it preserves soft tissue and vegetable matter that we rarely ever encounter in this condition. And again, even if you are absolutely sure you only care about facts about dinosaurs themselves, more information about their surroundings is useful. Knowing about what a herbivorous dinosaur ate, with some detective work to find what adaptations this diet would require, is likely to tell us about this animal's behavior and posture as well.
That said, there are dinosaurs. The site contains "dinosaur tracks from two species, says Jan Smit" ([2]; also mentioned in scientific source [3]). The Berkeley press release [1] says Smit mentionsed the "buried body of a Triceratops and a duck-billed hadrosaur", although it doesn't go into detail about condition or say whether the hadrosaur is complete or fragmentary (the Triceratops is a "partial carcass"). And given that all the author's other claims seem to hold up, I am inclined to believe the New Yorker article when it says large feathers and an egg with embryo were found at Tanis.
The mammal burrow is discussed in [5]. That alone would be a huge find and given the authors I find it unbelievable for it to be a fabrication.
Popular press:
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-dea...
[2] http://bambinidisatana.us/2017/01/27/devastation-detectives-...
GSA presentations:
[3] https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2016AM/webprogram/Paper284267.htm...
[4] https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305713.htm...
[5] https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305627.htm...
> The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact, essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event. Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of the fine-grained impactite. Although this deposit displays all of the physical characteristics of a tsunami runup, the timing (<1 hour postimpact) is instead consistent with the arrival of strong seismic waves from the magnitude Mw ∼10 to 11 earthquake generated by the Chicxulub impact, identifying a seismically coupled seiche inundation as the likely cause. Our findings present high-resolution chronology of the immediate aftereffects of the Chicxulub impact event in the Western Interior, and report an impact-triggered onshore mix of marine and terrestrial sedimentation—potentially a significant advancement for eventually resolving both the complex dynamics of debris ejection and the full nature and extent of biotic disruptions that took place in the first moments postimpact.
Scroll down for a link to the movie.
Although you could argue how much crocodile looks like a dinosaur. Personally they look pretty dinosaur-esque to me.
Many aquatic animals would have been able to survive the initial effects but would have been put in quite a pinch by the reduction in food that set in after. As mentioned, large land animals on the surface would have been mostly wiped out pretty quick, many of the rest would have starved as the one two punch of massive fires and reduced sunlight (and possibly global cooling) would have produced. Small animals that lived or took refuge underground (or perhaps were aquatic or semi-aquatic) could have survived the initial effects in large numbers and though they would have diminished in population in the hard times afterward could have eked through.
Scrappy little omnivores and/or scavengers would have been well suited to ride the waves of chaotic changes following the mass extinction.
7 cm jawbone. Some rat, that.
A fascinating story about this is in Baxter's "Evolution" book which starts with a little primate at the CT boundary and traces the history of the family to modern humans.
We need serious anti asteroid defenses.
I must say, "formidable paleontologist" Jack Horner comes off as a royal a-hole:
"But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he didn’t remember him: “In the community, we don’t get to know students very well.”"
"He planned to remove the entire burrow intact, in a block, and run it through a CT scanner back home, to see what it contained. “Any Cretaceous mammal burrow is incredibly rare,” he said. “But this one is impossible—it’s dug right through the KT boundary.” Perhaps, he said, the mammal survived the impact and the flood, burrowed into the mud to escape the freezing darkness, then died. “It may have been born in the Cretaceous and died in the Paleocene,” he said. “And to think—sixty-six million years later, a stinky monkey is digging it up, trying to figure out what happened.” He added, “If it’s a new species, I’ll name it after you.”"
and
"The block told the story of the impact in microcosm. “It was a very bad day,” DePalma said. “Look at these two fish.” He showed me where the sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony plates on its back—had been forced into the body of the paddlefish. One fish was impaled on the other. The mouth of the paddlefish was agape, and jammed into its gill rakers were microtektites—sucked in by the fish as it tried to breathe. DePalma said, “This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.”"
And then we have the one in a million chance of finding the one in a million site, which leads to what the article describes. Pretty awesome.
Please.
The central attack seems to be a straw-man; that it’s not a dinosaur graveyard, something that was never claimed in the article at all. It’s like they read the title, and jumped on Twitter without reading the whole article.
Also, some random comments about colonialism.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10wog2
My letter on a related topic
https://www.scribd.com/document/374712301/20180227-David-L-G...
1. It settles a question of whether the dinosaurs were already gone.
2. It let's us know what time of year the impact was.
3. We are literally seeing everything in that ecosystem. It is very, very rare to get a fossil record that shows us a whole ecosystem. (The best known example of mass fossils, tar pits, are very heavily biased towards scavengers. Mudslides will preserve a complete ecosystem, but usually not with the same quantity and quality as this one.)
4. For species after species you have complete preservation. Including soft tissue, body shape, skin, and so on.
5. He found tektites in amber. That is, we have pieces of the meteorite preserved in a substance that would preserve their chemical makeup. Once analyzed this will give us direct information about the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs that we could not have received any other way. For example we could learn whether it was a comet from the Oort cloud versus an asteroid from the inner solar system.
6. The quality of preservation is such that we not only can identify dinosaur feathers, we can identify where on the body those specific feathers came from.
7. The quality of soft tissue preservation is such that we can identify the diet that some of the animals ate.
8. The fact that the ammonite shell was initially pink upon being excavated suggests that we may be able to learn about the color of some of these things. Evidence of color is very hard to come by.
If the story holds up, this site is important for a lot of reasons beyond adding to the evidence for a meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs. And if this is a partial list that is obvious now, I am sure that the list will get much, much longer.