“Frozen in Place” Fossils Reveal Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck in Spring
Spring is a time for budding flowers, tender green leaves and baby animals. But 66 million years ago, that gentle season instead brought mass death and carnage from Earth's catastrophic impact with a massive space rock.
The moment of mass, instantaneous death preserved in Tanis, with broken and splintered fish fossils wrapped around tree branches and strewn in all directions, "was like the worst car crash you've ever seen, frozen in place," said lead study author Melanie During, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University in Sweden. It was also "the most spectacular deposit I've ever seen in my life," During said at a news conference on Feb. 22.
Other researchers who studied Tanis' Cretaceous death pit calculated that impact spherules would have fallen between 15 and 30 minutes after the asteroid crashed into Earth. Because spherules were in the fishes' gills but had not been swallowed, the fish were likely buried alive immediately after inhaling the glassy beads — within 30 minutes after the asteroid impact, according to the new study.
Records of carbon isotopes, or variations of the element carbon, from one of the fishes further confirmed that the fish died in springtime, the scientists wrote in the study.
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