Around 66 million years ago, a 12-kilometer-wide asteroid slammed into the earth, causing a massive explosion that sent debris into the atmosphere for years. The impact was felt 3,000 kilometers away, where it caused animals to die instantly. Earth tremors caused waves of water to surge onto land. Particles of molten rock invaded the gills of fish. A turtle was impaled on a piece of wood. A dinosaur had its leg blown off. Some 66 million years later, humans dug up the remains of that devastating event in South Dakota, at an archaeological dig called Tanis.
Scientists have been studying the fossils of Tanis for years. They can't definitively say that the chaos at Tanis was left on the exact day of the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, but the signs are all there. The chemical makeup of the particles found in fish are what one would expect from the impact. The well-preserved dinosaur leg, from a Thescelosaurus, shows no signs of disease, and the rest of it is nowhere nearby.
The Tanis fossils will be the subject of a BBC special titled Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough, to be broadcast on BBC One on April 15th. It will be aired on the PBS series Nova this fall. Read about the extraordinary finds from Tanis at BBC News. -via Damn Interesting
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