The Dinosaur Page -- April 8, 2022

This is over at the NY Times -- features a story coming out of North Dakota. Behind a paywall, but accessible through different passwords you probably have.

GREENBELT, Md. — Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago.

The object that slammed off the Yucatán Peninsula of what is today Mexico was about six miles wide, scientists estimate, but the identification of the object has remained a subject of debate. Was it an asteroid or a comet? If it was an asteroid, what kind was it — a solid metallic one or a rubble pile of rocks and dust held together by gravity?

“If you’re able to actually identify it, and we’re on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, ‘Amazing, we know what it was,’” Robert DePalma, the paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said on Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A video of the talk and a subsequent discussion between Mr. DePalma and prominent NASA scientists will be released online in a week or two, a Goddard spokesman said. Many of the same discoveries will be discussed in “Dinosaurs: The Final Day,” a BBC documentary narrated by David Attenborough, which will air in Britain in April. In the United States, the PBS program “Nova” will broadcast a version of the documentary next month.

Later in the article:

A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. Many paleontologists were intrigued but uncertain about the scope of Mr. DePalma’s claims; a research paper published that year by Mr. DePalma and his collaborators mostly described the geological setting of the site, which once lay along the banks of a river.

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The Book

I have to go back and look at this book: How Mountains Grew, John Dvorak, c. 2021. I believe the author spent a bit of time on this story. At that linked site, this is all I have so far;

Chapter 10: Western Interior Seaway -- Late Mesozoic Era 145.7 mya - 66.043 mya
Cretaceous Period

Chapter 11: A Calamitous Event -- Chicxulub Meteor Impact -- 66.043 mya

Along with dinosaurs, the ammonites go extinct. Not to be confused with the Amish-nites. The latter are still with us.