Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
Aren't we in the middle of a current mass extinction event? Only 12 more years to go.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Hey dumdum. That whole area was a shallow sea at that point.
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.
A planet of mammals? No, a planet of the Lizard People!
Be sure to vote for the right one next year.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's head this off . . . read the article. The event was not caused by the mega-tsunamis from the impact itself (which would have taken hours to arrive at the site from the proto-Gulf of Mexico) but by "seiche," which are localized earthquakes caused by the impact which arrived at the site of the find within minutes. This is why the tektites were inhaled by the still-living fish and also found impacted at the site -- the tektites were still raining down when this happened.
... the smallest physically possible leap. ;)
(I get you, of course. I just wish there was a better way of saying it.)
Despite any amount of scientific evidence presented and vetted, even if it's by the entire scientific community, the Fundamentalist Christians, Dominionists, and other religious types will claim it's all faked, that science is evil, they're all trying to sway the faithful from God to Satan, and so on, and so forth.
This is the era we're living in right now: The Age of Anti-Information. The stupid people are getting stupider, and when you challenge their non-truths and delusions, they get violent, vote for people like Trump, and generally start fucking up everything they can get their hands on. They have to be stopped before they do any more damage. Real Truth, Real Facts, that's the future mankind should have. Their way is like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Because they found timed slates in the same spot. Samples such as B.Rubblicus and F.Flinstonious clocked in, but they never clocked out.
We still have avian dinosaurs - I have one trying to take apart the thermostat on the wall as I write this. Some of them are pretty smart.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Could it have been the original Ash Wednesday?
How big was it when it entered the atmosphere? How quickly would it burn? How big was the atmosphere back then?
https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the dinosaurs died
I'm pretty sure the event that wiped out the dinosaurs had nothing to do with asteroids and tsunamis. It was a dinosaur version of Control, but they did not have a Christopher Pike or Burnham to eliminate the threat.
Lottie Dottie...I do like to party....
Of all the news outlets that covered this story this weekend ... USA Today? Really?
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
There will probably still be some human fossils around and archeological digs being done. This digs will presumably done by highly intelligent and evolved cockroaches who will be able to ascertain that there were once human made structures in some areas. Our landfills will be an interesting find to keep them busy also -- if they can resist the temptation to eat scraps they find.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Have the ad servers stopped serving malware yet?
check out tfa, if only for one picture; :)
you'll see DePalma's assistant wearing a Jurasic Park t-shirt, how cool is that
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Agnostics are just Atheists in training.
I wish that journalists would be expected to know at least a high-school level of science before being detailed to write about scientific discoveries. The K-T boundary does not mark "the end of the Cretacious Era", because there is no such thing. The K-T boundary marks the end of the Cretaceous Period, and also the end of the Mesozoic Era.
An impact big enough to significantly change gravity would cause destruction far beyond the capability of macroscopic life to survive. Consider the Earth as an uncooked egg, and drop it onto concrete. That kind of damage.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
She is one of a group of paleontologists who disputes that, that's the entire point she's trying to make. The view point you're expressing is exactly what she's criticizing.
Whether she's right or wrong... I don't know enough to tell. I do however question your certainty that dinosaurs wouldn't have been dominating the Earth after K-T if they weren't already in decline before the asteroid impact. The extinctions caused by the Deccan Traps may very well have lead to species disappearing that might have survived the impact, and might have dominated afterwards.
In that respect, she's 100% right.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.