Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe died that day.
Awkward sentence, but you get the idea. They think they’ve found a fossil dinosaur that was killed by the asteroid that smacked what’s now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out nearly all animal life on the planet.
The perfectly preserved leg, which even includes remnants of the animal’s skin, can be accurately dated to the time the asteroid that brought about the dinosaurs’ extinction struck Earth 66m years ago, experts say, because of the presence of debris from the impact, which rained down only in its immediate aftermath.
The debris is there. I call that exciting.
“It’s absolutely bonkers,” said Phillip Manning, a professor of natural history at the University of Manchester.
…
He said the team had also discovered the remains of fish that had breathed in impact debris from the asteroid strike, which occurred 1,864 miles (3,000km) away in the Gulf of Mexico.
That and the presence of other debris that rained down for a specific period immediately after the asteroid strike allowed them to date the site much more accurately than standard carbon dating techniques.
Don’t look up.
Comments
12 responses to “Quite a find”
Stupendous. Takes my mind briefly off the cliff towards which we’re
Radiocarbon dating works up to about 60,000 years.
Objection. It wiped out around 70-75% of all life, and a lot of animals survived to evolve to the animals we know today. There was a much larger extinction earlier that wiped out 90% of life. Minor nitpick.
Scientists don’t use carbon on things older than that, or believed to be older than that. They didn’t say (at least in the part Ophelia posted) that they used carbon dating, only dating. They more likely used Potassium-Argon dating, which can date objects as old as the earth – 4.5 billion years, give or take a few million.
I apologize for any pedantry that might be detected in my previous post…wait a minute. No, I don’t.
This post from 2019 is about the North Dakota site and includes a lot of informative commentary and links from youz guyz.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/the-chicxulub-crater/
My bad. I thought I remembered from what I’d read about the meteorite that it was near-total, and I didn’t check. By all means be pedantic i.e. informed and informative!
But the part that Ophelia quoted mentions carbon dating. It’s not clear from the article if they actually used carbon dating in addition to other methods, or just the other methods (but most likely it’s just the work a confused reporter).
And now that I click through to the article, I see it has this erratum:
WaM, the confused reporter thing was what I assumed if they did mention carbon dating. A lot of lay people know about carbon dating, and think it’s the only way we date things. Not that many are familiar with Potassium Argon dating, or several other methods used for older objects.
I first learned about this via Radiolab:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/dinopocalypse
This is one of the finest pieces of audio storytelling I’ve ever heard.
Thank you, must listen.
Here’s a better longer version–I’m watching it now :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYoqtBEzuiQ
“How did you learn to speak Dinosaur?!”
“Oh, I went to Evergreen.”