This would be direct evidence validating the famous theory and decades of hard work of scientists regarding the extinction of dinosaurs. Scientists never expected to find a direct witness to the asteroid impact.
A Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Leg Discovered in North Dakota Is Reportedly a doomsday relic for avian dinosaurs. The one where, a huge asteroid crashed into Earth, ending their era. The fossil of thescelosaurus, a small herbivore, was found alongside a fragment of the 11-kilometer-wide space rock that is believed to have killed it.
If the news has everyone jumping all over the place, we have to withhold judgment. It is not yet fully proven for all the experts that the Dinosaur actually died on that fateful day, 66 million years ago. But everything seems to fit together like a puzzle with all the pieces now available.
The Tanis dig site in North Dakota
This site where the fossil was exhumed would be absolutely exceptional. To a point that is difficult to formulate.
“We have so many details with this site that tell us what happened at every moment, it’s almost like watching a movie unfold. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day.”
Robert DePalma, a graduate student from the University of Manchester who led the excavations.
“The temporal resolution that we can achieve on this site exceeds our wildest dreams… It really shouldn’t exist and it’s absolutely beautiful. I never dreamed in my entire career that I could watch something a) so limited in time; and b) so beautiful, and also tells such a wonderful story. »
Phillip Manning, professor of natural history at the University of Manchester.
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Manning said that the team had also discovered the remains of fish that had breathed in the impact debris of the asteroid, which occurred 3,000 km away in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dinosaurs: The Final Day, a BBC documentary
All of this should provide the very first physical evidence that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous.
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The Tanis dig site is the focus of a BBC documentary, Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough. Very few dinosaur remains have been found in the rocks, even thousands of years before the impact. So discovering a fossil from the day of the destruction itself would be extraordinary. The famous narrator and presenter of the documentary introduces the fossil, as ” an impossible fossil. »
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Source : Livescience