Merdeka.com – Scientists have presented an amazing dinosaur foot fossil. The foot, still intact with the skin, is just one of a series of extraordinary finds from the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota.
But it’s not just their impeccable condition that draws attention, it’s what these ancient specimens display. The claim is that this Tanis creature was killed and buried the day a giant asteroid hit Earth.
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That day 66 million years ago was when the life span of the dinosaurs ended and the appearance of mammals began.
Quoted from the BBC, Thursday (7/4), very few carcasses or dinosaur remains have been found in recorded rocks even the last few thousand years before the impact. Having a specimen from that catastrophe was incredible.
The BBC has spent three years documenting Tanis for a show to be broadcast on 15 April and narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
Sir David will review the findings, many of which will be made public for the first time.
Along with the dinosaur’s legs, there were also fish that inhaled the impact of the asteroid collision debris that fell from the sky.
“We have so much detail from this site that it tells us what happened moment by moment, almost like watching a movie. You’re going to see rows of rocks, you see fossils there, and it takes you back to that day.” explains Robert DePalma, a graduate of the UK’s University of Manchester who led the Tanis excavation.
It is known that a 12-kilometer-wide space rock crashed into Earth causing the last mass extinction.
The affected site was identified in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Yucatan Peninsula, some 3,000 kilometers away from Tanis, but such was the energy given to the event, the devastation felt far and wide.
The North Dakota fossil site is a chaotic mix.
The remains of animals and plants seemed 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.
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Testing fossil finds
In the making of this TV programme, the BBC called on outside consultants to test some of these findings.
Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum London observed the dinosaur’s legs. He was a dinosaur expert who was primarily a plant-eater or ornithischian.
“It was Thescelosaurus. It was from a group for which we had no previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very convincingly that this animal was very scaly like lizards. They were not hairy like their meat-eaters contemporaries,” he explained.
“It looks like an animal that had its legs removed very quickly. There is no evidence of disease in the legs, no obvious pathology, no traces of bitten footprints, such as bite marks or missing pieces,” he continued.
“So the best idea we have is that these are animals that die more or less instantly.”
Did these dinosaurs go extinct when the asteroid hit Earth? According to Tanis’ team, it is very likely, given the position of the limbs in the excavated sediment.
But Professor Steve Busatte of the University of Edinburgh said he was still skeptical. He wanted the argument to be written in more peer-reviewed articles, and some paleo scientists with very specific specialties to go to the site to provide their independent assessments.
Professor Busatte, who also acts as an outside consultant to the BBC’s programme, said it was possible, for example, that the animals had died before the big crash and then reburied in a way that made their deaths appear concurrent.
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