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Scientists show amazingly preserved dinosaur foot fossils.
The body part, complete with skin, is just one of a series of extraordinary discoveries from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota State, USA.
It’s not just the immaculate condition that attracts attention – it’s what the specimens of these ancient creatures display.
It claims that the creatures at the Tanis site died and were buried the same day the giant asteroid hit Earth.
The day where 66 million years ago, when the age of dinosaurs ended and the appearance of mammals began.
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Very few dinosaur remains have been found in recorded rocks, even in the last few thousand years before the asteroid impact. Then obtaining a specimen from that natural disaster would be extraordinary.
BBC has spent three years documenting the Tanis geological site for a coverage that will air on April 15and narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
Sir David Attenborough (BBC)
David Attenborough reviewed the findings, and there are many that will be shown to the public for the first time.
Along with the discovery of the dinosaur’s legs, there were fish inhaling debris from the impact of an asteroid impact crash that fell from the sky.
We will see fossilized turtles pierced with wooden poles; the remains of small mammals and the holes they made; bark from horned triceratops; pterosaur embryos in eggs which are then made to fly; and what appear to be fragments from the asteroid impactor itself.
“We have so much detail from this site that it tells us what happened over time, it’s like watching a movie. You see a rock pool, you see fossils there, and it takes you back in time,” said Robert DePalma. , a graduate student at the University of Manchester, UK, who led the excavation of the Tanis site.
From that site, it became widely known that a rock from space 12 kilometers wide hit our planet and caused the last mass extinction.
The affected site has been identified in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. The site was 3,000 kilometers away from the Tanis site, but such was the energy emitted from the event millions of years ago, the devastation felt far and wide.
The fossil site in North Dakota is the site of mixed discoveries.
The remains of animals and plants appear to have been rolled together into a heap of sediment by the waves of the river water caused by the unimaginable vibrations of the earth. Aquatic organisms mix with land creatures.
BBC
The sturgeon and paddlefish in this tangled fossil are key. They have tiny particles stuck in their gills. The particle is a ball of molten rock that was blown away from an asteroid impact that then fell back across the planet. Fish will inhale these particles while in the river.
Spherule cells have been linked chemically and by radiometric dating to the impact site in Mexico. In the two particles recovered from the preserved tree resin, there were also small inclusions implying an extra-terrestrial origin of life.
“When we saw inclusions inside these tiny glass balls, we analyzed them chemically using synchrotron X-ray diffraction,” explains Prof Phil Manning, who is DePalma’s PhD supervisor in Manchester.
“We were able to separate the chemical and identify the composition of the material. All the evidence, all the chemical data from that study strongly suggests that we are looking at a piece of the impactor object; namely, from the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs.”
The existence of the Tanis fossil site was first publicly seen in New Yorker magazine in 2019. It caused an instant stir.
Science usually demands the presentation of a new discovery made in a scientific journal. Several peer-reviewed papers has now been published, and the excavation team promises more finds as they work through a careful process of deepening, preparing, and delineating the fossil.
To make a TV program, BBC invited a number of consultants to examine some of the findings.
Prof Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum observed the discovery of the dinosaur’s legs. He’s an expert on ornithischian (mostly plant-eating) dinosaurs.
“This is Thescelosaurus. We have no previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very convincingly that this animal was very scaly like a lizard. They were not hairy like their meat-eating contemporaries.”
“It looks like an animal that had its leg removed very quickly. There is no evidence of disease on the leg, no traces of bitten footprints, such as bite marks or missing pieces,” he said.
“So the best estimate we have is an animal that died more or less instantly.”
BBCThe big wave is thought to have drowned all the creatures in Tanis
The big question is whether these dinosaurs actually died when the asteroid hit Earth. The team excavating the Tanis site said it was highly probable, given the position of the limbs in the sediment.
If that were the case, this dinosaur would be an amazing find.
But Prof Steve Busatte from the University of Edinburgh admits he’s still a bit skeptical – at least for now.
He acts as an outside consultant BBC other. He wanted to see the arguments presented in his peer-reviewed articles, and several paleo scientists with very specific specialties went to the site to give their independent assessments.
Prof Busatte said it was possible, for example, that the animal had died before the big crash and then reburied in a way that made their deaths appear concurrent.
“The fish with the balls in their gills, they’re absolute conclusions for asteroids. But for some other claims – I’d say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that hasn’t been substantiated,” he said.
“But for some of these discoveries, does it matter if they died on the day or the year before the collision? Pterosaur eggs with babies inside are very rare; nothing like it from North America.”
BBC Pterosaur embryos are a wonderful find, especially for North America
There is no doubt that pterosaur eggs were special.
Modern X-ray technology makes it possible to determine the nature of the eggshell. The surface of this object appears to be rough but not hard, and may indicate a parent pterosaur burying its eggs in sand or sediment like a turtle.
It is also possible with X-ray tomography to extract the bones of the pterosaur chicks inside, print them and reconstruct what the animal would look like. DePalma has done it.
The baby pterosaurs may have been a species of azhdarchid, a group of flying reptiles whose adult wings could reach more than 10 meters from tip to tip.
DePalma delivers special lecture on the discovery of the Tanis site to an audience at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Wednesday. Day and Prof Manning will also present their latest data to the General Assembly of the European Geoscience Union in May.
Dinosaurs: The Last Day with Sir David Attenborough will be broadcast on BBC One on 15 April at 18:30 WIB. Another version has been made for the US science series Nova on the PBS network due to be broadcast later in the year.
It is possible to extract fossil bones virtually (BBC)
(ita / ita)
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