The Day the Dinosaurs Died
Uh, hello? This is not &quot;front page of HN for a day&quot; important. This is one of the most important findings in paleontology ever. If even half of the claims made about this site are true, then its importance is on par with the Burgess Shale. We likely now know the season the dinosaurs went extinct (it&#x27;s the Fall). This is like getting to drop a net in the ocean one day in the Cretacious and keeping whatever comes up, but has plant life as well. It&#x27;s not really a stretch to think the sediment here could even give us insight into the physics of meteor impacts! But all I can find online about this is that some popular science author posted an angry rant about it on twitter.<p>I&#x27;m not a scientist or anything. I&#x27;m some guy who took an interest in dating the Cretacious-Paleogene (K-T or KPB or K-Pg, etc.) extinction event last year. My perspective is narrow and biased. But no one seems to be willing to comment on this, so I felt compelled to dig up some information and report. In short: this is real, and it&#x27;s huge. Read the New Yorker article, and [1].<p>It&#x27;s okay to take issue with the way these findings have been presented, but there&#x27;s no reason to doubt the truth of the claims made in articles about this finding. DePalma is not a well-established scientist, but his collaboraters are respected and influential researchers. Walter Alvarez is probably the second most famous dinosaur researcher alive, having co-created the impact hypothesis in the first place. Jan Smit, while not as prominent in the public eye, is likely the world&#x27;s leading expert on K-T dating. I have personally also been impressed with the work of Klaudia Kuiper, who has made significant progress over the last two decades in improving the accuracy of radioisotope dating—specifically 40Ar&#x2F;39Ar, the current most precise method.<p>These people are not likely to fabricate a finding, much less one which would be instantly discovered when other scientists are allowed to access the site. Alvarez, in addition to already being famous, is 78 year old! Smit is 70 and retired, and shows no attention-seeking behavior as far as I can tell. It&#x27;s nearly impossible to even find a word written about the man. It&#x27;s also very unlikely that they would be mistaken about the nature of the find. If conference abstracts are to be believed, then multiple independent lines of evidence point very precisely to this event being associated with the Chicxulub impact. It&#x27;s worth noting that [3] gives an Ar&#x2F;Ar date of 66.03 mya for glass shards found at Tanis, which is exceedingly close to dates Kuiper (presumably using the same lab or labs) has found for zircons known to be from the K-T boundary.<p>People seem to be concerned about there being no actual dinosaurs in the site. Even if you believe fish are boring and only care about land fauna (I will admit to leaning that way myself), marine life is still hugely important for its ability to tell us about the environmental conditions at the time. Likewise for plants: don&#x27;t you care at all about what the earth looked like as dinosaurs roamed? Listen: we have plenty of dinosaur bones. This site is actually much more valuable than typical beds of large animal skeletons because it preserves soft tissue and vegetable matter that we rarely ever encounter in this condition. And again, even if you are absolutely sure you only care about facts about dinosaurs themselves, more information about their surroundings is useful. Knowing about what a herbivorous dinosaur ate, with some detective work to find what adaptations this diet would require, is likely to tell us about this animal&#x27;s behavior and posture as well.<p>That said, there are dinosaurs. The site contains &quot;dinosaur tracks from two species, says Jan Smit&quot; ([2]; also mentioned in scientific source [3]). The Berkeley press release [1] says Smit mentionsed the &quot;buried body of a Triceratops and a duck-billed hadrosaur&quot;, although it doesn&#x27;t go into detail about condition or say whether the hadrosaur is complete or fragmentary (the Triceratops is a &quot;partial carcass&quot;). And given that all the author&#x27;s other claims seem to hold up, I am inclined to believe the New Yorker article when it says large feathers and an egg with embryo were found at Tanis.<p>The mammal burrow is discussed in [5]. That alone would be a huge find and given the authors I find it unbelievable for it to be a fabrication.<p>Popular press:<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.berkeley.edu&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;66-million-year-old-deathbed-linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.berkeley.edu&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;66-million-year-old-dea...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bambinidisatana.us&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;27&#x2F;devastation-detectives-try-solve-dinosaur-disappearance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bambinidisatana.us&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;27&#x2F;devastation-detectives-...</a><p>GSA presentations:<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2016AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper284267.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2016AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper284267.htm...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2017AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper305713.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2017AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper305713.htm...</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2017AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper305627.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsa.confex.com&#x2F;gsa&#x2F;2017AM&#x2F;webprogram&#x2F;Paper305627.htm...</a>