A groundbreaking study confirms the season in which an asteroid destroyed dinosaurs and 75% of life on Earth
A groundbreaking study conducted by researchers at the Atlantic University of Florida (FAU) and an international team of scientists convincingly confirms the season in which the asteroid collision disaster occurred in Chiksholov, responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs and 75% of life on Earth 66 million years ago. The season of new beginnings, put an end to the 165 million years of dinosaurs’ rule and changed the course of the earth’s evolution.
The results of the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, greatly improve the ability to locate the early stages of the damage done to life on Earth. Robert DeFalma of FAU, Senior Author and Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Science, Charles A. College of Science. Schmidt and a doctoral student at the University of Manchester, and Anton Oleinik, Ph.D., a second author and associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at FAU, are contributing to important scientific advances in being able to understand the massive collision that brought the dinosaurs to an end.
“The season plays an important role in many biological functions such as culture, eating strategies, host-parasite interactions, seasonal dormancy and reproductive patterns,” said DeHafelma. “The collision with Chiksholov is therefore a critical question in the story of the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Until now, the answer to that question has remained unclear.”
Decades ago it was known that the horrific collision of the asteroid in Chiksholov hit the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. The collision has caused the third largest extinction in Earth’s history, and has dramatically changed the world’s days in ways similar to what is happening in the current global ecological crisis. But the small details of what happened after the collision and how these events led to the third-largest mass extermination in world history have remained very vague.
Robert de Palma (left) and Anton Oleinik, Ph.D., at a North Dakota site.
Credit: Florida Atlantic University
The new study began in 2014 and used a combination of traditional and innovative techniques to put together a track of clues that made it possible to identify the season of the Chiksholov collision event. Dahpalma examined the research site at Tanis in southwestern North Dakota, one of the most detailed sites in the world of the Cretaceous-Plague border, to understand the mechanism of action of the extinction event.
The unique structure and pattern of the growth lines in fossilized fish bones from the site, which resemble a barcode, showed that all the fish tested died in the spring-summer growth phase. Isotopic analysis in advanced growth line technologies independently confirmed this, showing an annual fluctuation that also ended in spring-summer growth.
Comparing the size of the youngest fish to modern growth rates allowed the team to predict how long after hatching the eggs the fish were buried. They compared it to the well-known modern spawning seasons and were able to deduce which seasonal area the deposit in tennis represented – spring to summer, just as it appears from the bones.
To the scientific paper
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