- Jonathan Amos
- BBC Scientific Correspondent
David Attenborough sought the help of experts to understand the significance of the fossilized dinosaur foot.
A group of scientists presented a remarkably preserved dinosaur foot.
The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of notable finds that have emerged from the site of knowin the state of North Dakota (United States).
But it is not only their exquisite condition that is striking, but also what these ancient specimens can represent.
Scientists believe the Tanis creatures died and were buried on the same day that a giant asteroid hit the Earth.
Era Andl day 66 million years ago in what the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began.
Very few dinosaur remains have been found in the rocks that even record the last thousands of years before the impact. Having a specimen of the cataclysm itself would be extraordinary.
The BBC spent three years filming a program in Tanis to air April 15, narrated by David Attenborough.
Attenborough will review the findings, many of which will be seen in public for the first time.
David Attenborough introduces the program.
evidence in fish
Next to the leg, here fish breathing impact debris as it rained from the sky.
Also seen is a fossil turtle stuck with a wooden stake, the remains of small mammals and the burrows they made, the skin of a horned triceratops, the embryo of a flying pterosaur inside its egg, and what appears to be a fragment of the pterosaur itself asteroid.
“We have so much detail on this site that tells us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like seeing it in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there and it takes you back to that day,” said Robert DePalma. , a graduate student at the University of Manchester (UK) who leads the Tanis excavation.
It is now widely accepted that a space rock about 12 kilometers wide hit our planet and caused the latest mass extinction.
The impact site was identified in Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Chicxulub(Yucatan peninsula). It is about 3,000 kilometers from Tanis, but such was the energy of the event that its devastation was felt far and wide.
The North Dakota camp is chaotic chaos.
The remains of animals and plants appear to have been washed on a sediment dump by river water waves caused by unimaginable earthquakes.
Aquatic organisms mix with the creatures of the earth.
The sturgeon and paddlefish in this tangle of fossils are key. They have small particles trapped in their gills. These are the spheres of molten rock ejected by the impact that then fell all over the planet.
Scientists believe it the fish breatheron the particles when they entered the river.
The spherules have been linked chemically and by radiometric dating to the impact site in Mexico, and in two of the recovered preserved tree resin particles there are also small inclusions that have a extraterrestrial origin.
“When we noticed that there were inclusions within these small glass spheres, we chemically analyzed them at the diamond X-ray synchrotron near Oxford,” explained Professor Phil Manning, supervisor of DePalma’s PhD. Manchester.
“We were able to separate the chemistry and identify the composition of that material. All the evidence, all the chemical data from that study strongly suggests that we’re looking at a piece of the asteroid that’s gone with the dinosaurs“, He added.
Exploration in Tanis
The existence of Tanis and the claims made about this place were first made public by the magazine The New Yorker in 2019, which was all the rage at the time.
Science often requires that the initial presentation of new discoveries be made in the pages of an academic journal. A few peer-reviewed articles have been published, and the excavation team promises many more during the meticulous process of extracting, preparing and describing the fossils.
The excavation site is full of rounded particles; debris ejected from the impact site 3,000 kilometers away.
To make its TV show, the BBC called in outside experts to review many of the results.
Professor Paul Barrett, of the Natural History Museum in London and an expert on ornithischian (mainly herbivorous) dinosaurs, studied the leg.
“You are a Thescelosaurus. It comes from a group for which we had no precedent on the appearance of their skin, and very conclusively shows that these animals were very scaly, like lizards. They didn’t have feathers like their carnivorous contemporaries, “she said.
“It looks like an animal that has just had a paw ripped off very quickly. There is no evidence of disease on the leg, no obvious pathology, no traces of the pulled leg, such as bite marks or missing parts of it.” “she said.
“So the strongest idea we have is that this it is an animal that died more or less instantly“, He added.
A rising tide is believed to have buried all creatures in Tanis (digital recreation).
The big question is whether this dinosaur actually died the day the asteroid struck as a direct result of the cataclysm that followed.
Tanis’ team thinks it most likely is, given the location of the limb in the excavation’s sediments.
If so, it would be a nice find.
Skepticism
This was stated by Professor Steve Busatte of the University of Edinburgh it’s a much skeptical at the moment.
Busatte, who was another of the BBC’s external consultants, wants to see the arguments made in more peer-reviewed articles and that some paleoscientists with very specific specialties log on to the site to give their independent assessment.
The expert said it is possible, for example, that animals that died before the impact were brought to light by the violence of the day and then returned to the ground, so that their deaths appear simultaneous.
“Those fish with the spherules on their gills are an absolute calling card for the asteroid. But for some of the other claims I would say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that has yet to be here I’mOh to the jury“, he assured.
“However, for some of these discoveries, does it matter whether they died the day before or years ago? The pterosaur egg with a baby pterosaur inside is super rare; there is nothing like it northmeter. Not everything has to be about the asteroid. “
Reconstruction of the pterosaur
A pterosaur embryo is a rare find, especially for North America.
There is no doubt that the pterosaur egg is special.
With modern X-ray technology it is possible to determine the chemistry and properties of the eggshell. It was likely leathery rather than tough, which could indicate that the pterosaur mother buried the egg in sand or sediment, as turtles do.
It is also possible with X-ray tomography to virtually extract the bones of the pterosaur chick inside, print them and reconstruct what the animal would have been like. De Palma did it.
The baby pterosaur was likely a type of azhdarchid, a group of flying reptiles whose adult wings could reach more than 10 meters from tip to tip.
It is virtually possible to extract fossilized bones and print them to make a model.
On Wednesday, DePalma gave a special lecture on Tanis’ findings to an audience at the US space agency NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He and Manning will also present their latest data to the European Union’s Geosciences General Assembly in May.
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