Fossils show world-wide catastrophe on the day the dinosaurs died
A tangled mass of fish from the deposit in North Dakota's Hell Creek formation. By Ben Guarino Ben Guarino Reporter covering the practice and culture of science Email Bio Follow March 29 at 6:24 PM Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.
About 3 in 4 species perished in what is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, also known as the K-Pg event or K-T extinction. The killer asteroid most famously claimed the dinosaurs. But the T. rex and the triceratops were joined by hordes of other living things. Freshwater and marine creatures were victims, as were plants and microorganisms, including 93 percent of plankton.
DePalma, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, began excavating the site at North Dakota’s Hell Creek formation in 2013. Since then, DePalma and other paleontologists have found heaps of fossilized sturgeon and paddlefish with glass spheres still in their gills. In the early 1990s, researchers found the scar left by the asteroid — a crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. The impact was named after the nearby Mexican town of Chicxulub. Suggested “kill mechanisms” for the Chicxulub impact abound: It may have poisoned the planet with heavy metals, turned the ocean to acid, shrouded Earth in darkness or ignited global firestorms. Its punch may have triggered volcanoes that spewed like shaken soda cans.
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