Scientists Find 66-Million-Year-Old Fossils From The Day The Dinosaurs Died (usatoday.com)

"It's like a time capsule of the end of the world," reports USA Today: 66 million years ago, in what's now North Dakota, a group of animals died together, only a few minutes after a huge asteroid smashed into the Earth near present-day Mexico. Scientists Friday announced the discovery of the jumbled, fossilized remains of the animals, all killed when a tsunami-like wave and a torrent of rocks, sand and glass buried them alive.

This graveyard of fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur is a unique, first-of-its-kind discovery from the exact day that life on Earth changed forever, according to the study lead author Robert DePalma, a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History... DePalma added that the find provides spectacular new detail to what is perhaps the most important event to ever affect life on Earth... The asteroid impact and resulting mass extinction, which scientists call the K-T boundary, marked the end of the Cretaceous Era. The aftereffects of that infamous asteroid collision killed 75 percent of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. It's the planet's most recent mass extinction.
Scientists believe the asteroid was 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) wide, the BBC reports, and that it "hurled billions of tonnes of molten and vaporised rock into the sky in all directions - and across thousands of kilometres." DePalma argues that moment "is tied directly to all of us -- to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet.

"Nothing was the same after that impact. It became a planet of mammals rather than a planet of dinosaurs."

Comments

If legit, it is the paleo find of the century

[PeeAitchPee]

Just finding amber-preserved tektites is a huge deal (meaning their chemical signature would be basically the same as it was during the event -- something never before encountered). If there actually are non-reworked dinosaur bones in close proximity to / at the K-T boundary, it would unequivocally prove that the dinosaurs survived all the way up to the asteroid impact, which has been the subject of some debate. DePalma is taking a lot of flak for doing some Barnum-type hyping of the find, and for maintaining extreme secrecy about the location of the site -- as well as for letting journalists release some details that are apparently not included in the peer-reviewed paper (e.g., the existence of said dino bones). But if even part of what is says he has found is true, then it is a truly historic find which will represent a quantum leap in our understanding of the bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and even shed a lot of light for what to expect about similar impacts in the future. Personally, I think that (in addition to his showmanship and relative lack of transparency so far) a lot of the blowback is coming from folks at bigger institutions who are a bit miffed that this find was produced not by their ranks but by a younger, non-Ph.D. paleontologist playing somewhat by his own rules. But big scientific claims require lots of scrutiny, and eventually proof. Let's hope now that the word is out, he eventually puts it all out there for the scientific community to assess.

Re:If legit, it is the paleo find of the century

[squiggleslash]

The people who are questioning the impact theory, to the best of my knowledge, are not claiming dinosaurs were already extinct by the time the asteroid hit. Rather they're saying it came at a bad time during an already in progress mass extinction, caused by volcanic activity. Gerta Keller, for example, says "I'm sure the day after, they had a headache," but adds "we vastly overestimate the damage to the environment and to life that this Chicxulub impact had".

(Note this is an old quote and she may have updated her views since given relatively recent research into the size and power of the asteroid. I do know though that she and others believe that the formation of the Decca Traps, which changed the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, was the primary culprit.)