Artwork: The thinking is that a water surge buried all the creatures at Tanis
The BBC has an article about a fossil site that preserves a snapshot of what may have been the last day of the non-avian dinosaurs. Nicknamed Tanis and located in North Dakota, the site has fossils of exquisite detail that are seem to have been deposited at the same time. Recently, the site's primary researcher, Robert DePalma, gave a talk at the NASA's Goddard Space Center. For more information, see "Shards of Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs May Have Been Found in Fossil Site" in the New York Times and an article from 2019 in the New Yorker called "The Day the Dinosaurs Died". Next week, the BBC is planning to are a documentary called "Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough".
We see a fossil turtle that was skewered by a wooden stake; the remains of small mammals and the burrows they made; skin from a horned triceratops; the embryo of a flying pterosaur inside its egg; and what appears to be a fragment from the asteroid impactor itself.
"We've got so many details with this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it's almost like watching it play out in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day," says Robert DePalma, the University of Manchester, UK, graduate student who leads the Tanis dig.
It's now widely accepted that a roughly 12km-wide space rock hit our planet to cause the last mass extinction.
The impact site has been identified in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Yucatan Peninsula. That's some 3,000km away from Tanis, but such was the energy imparted in the event, its devastation was felt far and wide.
The North Dakota fossil site is a chaotic jumble.
The remains of animals and plants seem to have been rolled together into a sediment dump by waves of river water set in train by unimaginable earth tremors. Aquatic organisms are mixed in with the land-based creatures.
A pterosaur embryo inside an egg, found at the Tanis site...
Back in 2019, ESCONI president Keith Robitschek wrote an article about Tanis. It was first discovered in 2002 by ESCONI member Rob Sula.
In 2010, a large excavation team which included Gainesville State students returned to the site and attempted to remove another piece of jacketed matrix. A smaller jacket was eventually sent to the Denver Museum of Natural History. So, who were these forgotten Paleontologists? None other than our own Rob Sula, former First Vice-President of ESCONI, who initially found the first fossils at the site in 2002 and Paleo Prospectors owner Doctor Steve Nicklas. Dr. Steve Nicklas found the first articulated sturgeon and determined the fossil producing layer. In 2012, Paleo Prospectors made a hand shake agreement to offer the site to Robert DePalma who previously worked a fossil fish site in the Hell Creek.
