For this dinosaur geek, this is actually a little sobering:
In a paper to be published April 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences an international team of authors, including University of Washington Provost Mark Richards, share the discovery of a site that tells another piece of the story from the day a meteor strike is thought to have led to the end of the dinosaurs.
“It’s like a museum of the end of the Cretaceous in a layer a meter and a half thick,” said Richards, who is also a professor in the UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences.
This unique fossilized graveyard – fish stacked one atop another mixed with burned tree trunks and conifer branches, dead mammals, a pterosaur egg, a mosasaur and insects, the carcass of a Triceratops and seaweed and marine snails called ammonites – was unearthed over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota by lead author Robert DePalma.
“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the KT boundary,” said DePalma, curator of paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. “Nowhere else on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.” [University of Washington News]
Associated with the Chicxulub meteor crater off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, the pictures that can be seen at the link above are a graphic illustration of the uncaring forces of Nature which could drop on our heads at any moment. These ancient creatures are not the unfortunate victims of predators, or predators who took a wrong step into a sinkhole and never made it out – they are the evidence of mass, instantaneous death.
A sobering thought.
