By Alejandro I. López
The story is well known: 65 million years ago, a meteor with a diameter of 14 km (8 miles) crashed on Earth. The effects of the massive ensuing explosion were utterly fatal for dinosaurs and in their place a whole new kind of living organism blossomed. Yet, we knew surprisingly little of what this impact was like. Until now.
Though we currently know that most dinosaurs didn’t die immediately after the impact, but instead underwent a process of prolonged agony as the world’s resources diminished—killing over 76% of the species that walked the Earth at the time—there’s still much we ignored about the event that led to the proliferation of mammalian and avian life we see today.
However, an incredible new find in North Dakota, over 3,000 km away from the Yucatan Peninsula (the impact site), provides more clues to recreate the immediate aftermath of the cosmic accident that ended the dinosaurs’ domination of Earth.
Read more: Five Things About Dinosaurs Everybody Gets Wrong
Within the excavation site, called Tanis, several fossils were found belonging to fishes and other marine organisms, together with fossilized plants and terrestrial vertebrates from the time. All of these remains formed a sediment layer over 5 feet thick. The fossils were mixed with pieces of rock and debris consistent with the seismic wave.
A team from the University of Kansas, led by Robert de Palma, described the finding as a tangled mass of dinosaur bones, feathers, and the remains of several other living beings that confirm the asteroid’s global reach, which crashed in what is now Mexico.
Read more: 6 Urban Myths About The T-Rex You Always Thought Were True
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (and publicly available in an accessible format in a long piece by The New Yorker), shed new light over the moments immediately following the impact. They effectively provide a kind of snapshot of that very instant. And that’s really exciting.
This research coincides with a recent simulation developed by scientists at the University of Michigan, which attempts to recreate the oceanic movement after impact. The model estimates that the seismic waves caused a giant tsunami at least 1 mile tall that reached a speed of 8 inches per second. The wave devastated the coasts across the world.
Read more: 7 Illustrations Of Prehistoric Animals So Cute We Wish They’d Survived
The crater in Yucatan represents an ideal location to obtain further clues about evolution.
Translated by Oliver G. Alvar
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