Posted on 04/10/2019 11:59:24 AM PDT by Candor7
Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.
Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt.
Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper published Friday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a discovery that has sparked tremendous excitement among paleontologists.
"You're going back to the day that the dinosaurs died," said Timothy Bralower, a Pennsylvania State University paleoceanographer who is studying the impact crater and was not involved with this work.
"That's what this is. This is the day the dinosaurs died."
About 3 in 4 species perished in what is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, also known as the K-Pg event or K-T extinction. The killer asteroid most famously claimed the dinosaurs.
But the T. rex and the triceratops were joined by hordes of other living things. Freshwater and marine creatures were victims, as were plants and microorganisms, including 93 percent of plankton. (A lone branch of dinosaurs, the birds, lives on.) SNIP
What was the good part?
I guess the big lizards dying was OK.
“Did you name him Rex?”
His name was Eric. He was a good boy and used to keep the damned Brachiosaurus out of my vegetable garden. Their droppings were enormous!
My pet Alligator, Sea Turtle and parrot survived, even though they were supposedly at ground zero
It was all Trump’s fault.
“How could you afford to feed him? My Raptor was not too tough to feed.”
In those days I could get good coupons for Purina Tryrannosaur chow.
We lived....................
The reason I started to like Firefly.
“Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico.”
And just think: It could happen again. Talk about Gorebull warming.
This came out last week. Article in the wapoo. One in press in PNAS IIRC. And the New Yorker.
Fiction. Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders still roam the Earth to this day.
They also kept accusing their President of collusion with trilobites.
I drove my Chevy to the levy. The day the dinosaurs died.
PING
Ping to fossil record in the Dakotas.
Proves most of the extinction event happened within 2 hours of the asteroid impact in the Yucatan. A mammal borrow also has been found with associated fossils. proving that warm blooded animals were intelligent enough to survive by going underground
Lol You were taking care of him the smart way.
Link to the scientific paper in Proceeding of National Academy of Science
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116
Link the New Yorker Article (more interesting unless you are a Paleontologist, geologist, or geomorphologist)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died
Thx! It says that there is a PDF there. I’ll take a look when I fire up my log burning laptop.
Cheers, ‘Pod
For some reason I like it, though. As peeker, that is, not as a participant.
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