Tanis: “First Dinosaur Fossil Connected To An Asteroid Strike”

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“We have so many details about this site that we can see what happened in each moment. It’s almost like watching the movie. Robert DePalma is a graduate student at the University of Manchester who manages the Tanis dig.

It is now accepted that the last mass extinction was caused by a 12 km-wide space rock.

The Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatan Peninsula has been identified as the impact site. It is approximately 3,000km from Tanis. However, the devastation caused by the event was felt far and beyond.

The North Dakota fossil site is chaotic.

Animal and plant remain to seem to have been mixed together by river water waves, which were then driven by unimaginable earth shakings. The land-based animals are also mixed with aquatic organisms.

This fossil tangle is key to the paddlefish and sturgeon. These tiny particles are stuck in their gills. These are molten rock spherules that were thrown out by the impact and then returned to the planet. These particles would have been inhaled by the fish as they entered the river.

Radiometric dating has linked the spherules to the Mexican impact site. Two of the particles from preserved tree resin contain tiny inclusions which suggest an extra-terrestrial origin.

“When we saw that there were inclusions in these little glass spherules,” Prof Phil Manning, Mr. DePalma’s Ph.D. supervisor at Manchester, explained.

 “We were able to identify the chemical composition and dissect the chemistry. All of the evidence and all of the chemical data from that study strongly suggest that we are looking at a fragment of the impactor. It is the part that killed the dinosaurs.

In 2019, the New Yorker Magazine published the first public announcement about Tanis’ existence and its claims. The news caused much controversy at the time.

Science requires that new discoveries are presented in scholarly journals. There are a few peer-reviewed papers that have been published. The dig team is promising many more as they work through the detailed process of extracting, preparing, and describing fossils.

The BBC hired outside consultants to help it analyze a few of its finds in order to make its television program.

The leg was examined by Prof Paul Barrett, London’s Natural History Museum. He is an expert on ornithischian dinosaurs (mostly plants-eating).

It’s a Thescelosaurus. This specimen is from a group where we don’t have any records of its skin. It shows that these animals are very similar to lizards. They were not feathered as their meat-eating counterparts.

This looks like a leg that was ripped off quickly by a stray animal. He tells me that there is no evidence of disease on the leg, no apparent pathologies, and there is no trace of the leg having been scavenged such as bite marks or pieces missing.

“So, we think that it is an animal that dies more or less instantly.