Tanis Back In The News -- October 12, 2022

Tanis was mentioned at the blog at this post. Tanis is a fossil site in southwestern North Dakota that is ground zero for dinosaur fossils from the day the big space rock hit the earth, the beginning of the end of non-avian dinosaurs.

So, now, another story from Tanis, sent to me by a reader.

Just beneath the scrubby plains of southern North Dakota at the site of an ancient riverbed, paleontologists are hard at work digging up the end of the world as the dinosaurs knew it. 

Now, they've discovered two newfound species of 66 million-year-old sturgeon that lived and died alongside dinosaurs, preserved as fossils in exquisite three-dimensional detail. Their work was published in the Journal of Paleontology on October 3, 2022. 

The team found the fossils at a site called "Tanis," named after the purported last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in the 1981 movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark." 

Tanis is a section of the famous Hell Creek Formation, which spans parts of Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming, and it was once home to a large, deep river that fed the now-dry Western Interior Seaway that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. 

But one fateful day 66 million years ago, Tanis became a mass grave for thousands of ancient freshwater fish, which were smothered and buried in place in the blink of an eye, possibly in the minutes after the asteroid impact that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs.

What I find most amazing: how similar to modern day sturgeon these old ("new"?) fish are. Amazing.