The find will be transmitted by the BBC. The fossils of the Tanis site testify to the destruction due to the impact perhaps with a comet that led to mass extinction
Tanis: the place where the devastation and mass extinction caused by the impact with a space body 66 million years ago can be seen first hand. The extraordinary North Dakota fossil site has now returned an even more exceptional find: a perfectly preserved leg, including the skin, of a dinosaur that died at the same time as the greatest disaster on Earth in the past 250 million years. The video, condensed into three years of footage of the excavations at the Tanis site, will be broadcast by the BBC on Friday 15 April with the narrator of the greatest television science communicator: Sir Richard Attenborough.
The impact and the end
The impact, probably with the nucleus of a comet 10-12 km in diameter more than with an asteroid, occurred exactly 66 million 52,000 years ago (with a margin of error of 8,000 years more or less), according to more recent and accurate dating back to 2019. He struck in the spring a partially submerged platform composed largely of gypsum and limestone in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. The crash, which produced an energy equal to 1 billion times the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, among other things developed a huge shock wave, an earthquake of magnitude 11, threw millions of tons of material into the atmosphere and lifted one
tsunami hundreds of meters high. The destruction came as far as Tanis, at the time on a river on a peninsula that was within a long and narrow seaway (Western Interior Seaway) that started from the Gulf of Mexico, dividing the central United States into two. almost on the border with Canada. Tanis was about 3,000 kilometers from the impact site, the Chicxulub crater, but the apocalypse came suddenly in 13 minutes and for the dinosaurs and other animals that lived on its banks there was no escape.
get to know
The paleontologist Robert De Palma, cousin of the famous director Brian, discovered in Tanis a 130 cm thick layer in which the fossil remains of animals and trees are stacked one on top of the other, with some fish even upright, indicating a destructive event. instant and devastating as a sex, a sudden rise in water that is generated inside closed basins due to seismic waves coming from far away. Inside the gills of the fish, vitrified spherules were found that could only have been produced by a gigantic impact and then rained incandescent from the sky. The perfectly preserved leg found in Tanis belonged to a herbivorous dinosaur of the genus Thescelosaurus, which had a skin similar to that of lizards. Even if some specialists question whether that single paw is actually the testimony of a dead specimen for a cause directly linked to the Chixculub impact, Tanis remains the symbolic place of the disaster of 66 million years ago.
April 7, 2022 (change April 7, 2022 | 14:10)
© Time.News