An asteroid impact near what's now the Yucatan Peninsula caused giant waves in an inland sea that sloshed into the mouth of a river, leaving a fossilized record of the day the dinosaurs were wiped off the planet.
(Illustration courtesy of Robert DePalma via UC Berkley)
A site in North Dakota nicknamed Tanis has perfectly preserved fossils of fish, animals and plants.
The fossil layer formed when a killer asteroid struck off what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.
Some of the fossilized fish at the site inhaled tiny glass beads formed by the impact.
Buried for 66 million years, a prehistoric graveyard is revealing what happened in the minutes after a giant asteroid slammed into the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, a new study says.
The site, part of the Hell Creek Formation in what is now North Dakota, used to lie along an inland sea that divided North America into two land masses.
“Essentially, what we've got there is the geologic equivalent of high-speed film of the very first moments after the impact,” paleontologist Robert DePalma, the study's lead author, told National Geographic.
Perfectly preserved fossils of fish, animals and plants at the site, which is nicknamed Tanis, offer a detailed recording of what happened immediately after the killer asteroid struck off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, according to the study to be published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The impact created a giant crater, called Chicxulub, and it ejected tons and tons of vaporized rock and asteroid dust into the atmosphere. The cloud that enveloped the planet led to the extinction of 75 percent of life on Earth and the end of the Cretaceous period.
“We’ve understood that bad things happened right after the impact, but nobody’s found this kind of smoking-gun evidence,” study co-author David Burnham of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute said in a statement. “People have said, ‘We get that this blast killed the dinosaurs, but why don’t we have dead bodies everywhere?’ Well, now we have bodies. They’re not dinosaurs, but I think those will eventually be found, too.”
Within 45 minutes to an hour, thousands of tiny glass beads formed by the impact began to rain down on the site. Some of these beads, called tektites, were inhaled by the fish in the inland sea, according to a University of California Berkley news release about the study. The tektites would later be found stuck in the fishes' gills. Other tektites, zooming out of the atmosphere at 100 to 200 mph, landed in the mud left by waves from the inland sea. Others are thought to have caused wildfires across the entire continent.
The asteroid's impact also set off shockwaves that caused the inland sea to slosh like water in a bathtub. The waves washed sturgeon, paddlefish and other marine creatures onto a sandbar at the mouth of a river where they were stranded.
Fossilized fish stacked atop each other suggests they were flung ashore and died stranded together on a sand bar after the waves from the inland sea withdrew.
(Courtesy of Robert DePalma via UC Berkley)
The tektites and other debris from the impact fell for another 10 to 20 minutes. Another big wave sloshed out of the sea and covered everything with sand, gravel and fine sediment.
“A tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures was all packed into this layer by the inland-directed surge,” said DePalma, a University of Kansas doctoral student and a curator at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida.
In addition to fish and marine organisms, DePalma, who has worked at the site not far from Bowman, North Dakota, for the past six years, has found parts of a triceratops, a duck-billed hadrosaur, insects, mammals, bones from a marine reptile called a mosasaur, and burned trees and conifer branches. He also found feathers that may have belonged to a dinosaur, according to an extensive article about the find in the New Yorker.
They're all in the sedimentary layer known as the K-T boundary that marks the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary period. It's also called the K-Pg boundary.
“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the K-T boundary,” DePalma said. “At no other K-T boundary section 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.”
Mark Richards, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, said, “It’s like a museum of the end of the Cretaceous in a layer a meter-and-a-half thick."
DePalma said, “It’s difficult not to get choked up and passionate about this topic. We look at moment-by-moment records of one of the most notable impact events in Earth’s history. No other site has a record quite like that. And this particular event is tied directly to all of us — to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet. Nothing was the same after that impact. It became a planet of mammals rather than a planet of dinosaurs."
A mysterious fireball that lit up the skies over Northern Florida on Saturday night turned out to be a meteor that was picked up on weather radar, according to officials.
The falling space rock was reported around 11:52 p.m. over Taylor County, the National Weather Service's Tallahassee office said on Twitter.
The flash from the meteor was so bright it was picked up on weather satellites that are typically used to track thunderstorms and lightning.
Officials said they haven't received any reports of where the meteor possibly landed or if it broke up in the atmosphere. Residents in Georgia and South Carolina also reported seeing the flash.
Meteors are what happened when meteoroids -- what we call "space rocks" -- enter Earth’s atmosphere at a high speed and burn up, according to NASA.
"This is also when we refer to them as 'shooting stars,'” the agency notes. "Sometimes meteors can even appear brighter than Venus -- that’s when we call them 'fireballs.'"
Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day, according to NASA.
"When a meteoroid survives its trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it’s called a meteorite," the space agency states.
A mysterious fireball that lit up the skies over Northern Florida on Saturday night turned out to be a meteor that was picked up on weather radar, according to officials.
The falling space rock was reported around 11:52 p.m. over Taylor County, the National Weather Service's Tallahassee office said on Twitter.
The flash from the meteor was so bright it was picked up on weather satellites that are typically used to track thunderstorms and lightning.
Officials said they haven't received any reports of where the meteor possibly landed or if it broke up in the atmosphere. Residents in Georgia and South Carolina also reported seeing the flash.
Meteors are what happened when meteoroids -- what we call "space rocks" -- enter Earth’s atmosphere at a high speed and burn up, according to NASA.
"This is also when we refer to them as 'shooting stars,'” the agency notes. "Sometimes meteors can even appear brighter than Venus -- that’s when we call them 'fireballs.'"
Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day, according to NASA.
"When a meteoroid survives its trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it’s called a meteorite," the space agency states.
The discovery of a fossilized fish may offer a glimpse into the day an asteroid hit the earth and wiped dinosaurs off the planet 66 million years ago, according to a new study.
The "exquisitely-preserved" fossils, some of which are of fish with hot glass in their gills, were found in North Dakota's Hell Creek Formation and are thought to have formed after an asteroid slammed into Mexico, causing flaming debris to rain onto the ground, according to a press release from the University of Kansas.
The fossils offer the first-ever "detailed snapshot of the terrible moments right after the Chicxulub impact — the most cataclysmic event known to have befallen life on Earth," the release states.
(Robert DePalma/Kansas University/AFP/Getty Images) This photo taken, March 29, 2019, by the University of Kansas,shows a partially exposed, perfectly preserved 66-million-year-old fish fossil uncovered.The site appears to date to the day 66 million years ago when a meteor hit Earth, killing nearly all life on the planet.
The impact wiped out about 75 percent of the animal and plant species living on Earth at the time, including dinosaurs.
The fossilized creatures lived in the vicinity of a deeply chiseled river, according to the release. A rushing surge of water in the minutes after the impact likely created the "tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures," which were all preserved in a layer in the rock formation discovered by Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas doctoral student in geology.
The fish were killed "pretty suddenly because of the violence of that water," said the study's co-author, David Burnham, preparator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. One of the fossilized fish had broken in half after it hit a tree, Burnham said.
Finding these hundreds of ancient fish fossils is even more significant because the fish are cartilaginous instead of bony, and less prone to fossilization, Burnham said. Scientists are also discovering new species within the collection of fossils.
(Robert DePalma/Kansas University/AFP/Getty Images) The University of Kansas' Robert DePalma(L)and field assistant Kylie Ruble(R) excavate fossil carcasses from the Tanis deposit, March 29, 2019.
The planet was "inherited" by mammals after the asteroid's impact, Burnham said.
“We’ve understood that bad things happened right after the impact, but nobody’s found this kind of smoking-gun evidence,” he said. “People have said, ‘We get that this blast killed the dinosaurs, but why don’t we have dead bodies everywhere?’ Well, now we have bodies. They’re not dinosaurs, but I think those will eventually be found, too.”
The study will be published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, according to the University of Kansas.
A mysterious fireball that lit up the skies over Northern Florida on Saturday night turned out to be a meteor that was picked up on weather radar, according to officials.
The falling space rock was reported around 11:52 p.m. over Taylor County, the National Weather Service's Tallahassee office said on Twitter.
The flash from the meteor was so bright it was picked up on weather satellites that are typically used to track thunderstorms and lightning.
Officials said they haven't received any reports of where the meteor possibly landed or if it broke up in the atmosphere. Residents in Georgia and South Carolina also reported seeing the flash.
Meteors are what happened when meteoroids -- what we call "space rocks" -- enter Earth’s atmosphere at a high speed and burn up, according to NASA.
"This is also when we refer to them as 'shooting stars,'” the agency notes. "Sometimes meteors can even appear brighter than Venus -- that’s when we call them 'fireballs.'"
Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day, according to NASA.
"When a meteoroid survives its trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it’s called a meteorite," the space agency states.
The two galaxies that form NGC 6052 are now so close that the boundaries are no longer clear.ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Adamo et al.
Originally discovered in 1784, NGC 6052 was first thought to be one galaxy with an unusual shape.
Scientists eventually discovered that it was, in fact, two galaxies in the process of colliding.
Having previously been observed by the Hubble telescope in 2015, NASA recently released a stunning image of the galaxies in even closer detail.
First discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, NGC 6052 was originally thought to be a singular galaxy that simply had an odd shape.
However, scientists eventually figured out that the "oddly shaped galaxy" 230 million light-years away was, in fact, two galaxies in the process of colliding.
Having previously been observed by the Hubble telescope with an older camera in 2015, NASA recently released a stunning image of the galaxies in even better detail.
This object was previously observed by Hubble with its old Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) in 2015.ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
The two galaxies that form NGC 6052 are now so close that the boundaries are no longer clear and the original galaxies are losing their shape at a quickening pace.
"Eventually, this new galaxy will settle down into a stable shape, which may not resemble either of the two original galaxies," explained the European Space Agency. A complete fusion would throw the stars out of their original orbits and take new places.
According to NASA, as well as the union of the two galaxies being beautiful and fascinating, it's also very rare due to the fact that galaxies are mostly comprised of empty space.
In about four billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda are to collide and join to form one single galaxy. For now, however, the scientists are still researching NGC 6052.
Den Originalartikel gibt es auf Business Insider Deutschland. This post originally appeared on Business Insider Deutschland and has been translated from German. Copyright 2019. Und ihr könnt Business Insider Deutschland auf Twitter folgen.
