A revelation at the heart of a BBC documentary, “Dinosaurs: The Final Day”, for which journalists followed and filmed the teams on site for years. Paleontologists would have discovered animals there that would have been “killed and buried the day the giant asteroid hit the earth”. And this while “fossils of dinosaurs dating from the period preceding the extinction are very rare, finding so many traces of the day of the cataclysm is extraordinary”, marvels Phillip Manning, professor of natural history at the University of Manchester.
An exact picture
For Robert DePalma, a graduate of the same university, who is leading the excavations, “we have so many details on this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it’s like seeing it unfold in the movies. We look at the rock formations, we look at the fossils here, and it takes us back to that day. »
Came out of the ground, a particularly well-preserved leg of thescelosaurus, but also fish having ingested dust from that day, animals killed by the debris of the celestial body, including a turtle impaled on a wooden stake… And even a fragment of asteroid.