Tanis: 'First dinosaur fossil 'linked to asteroid strike'
Scientists have presented a stunningly preserved leg of a dinosaur.
The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth.Very few dinosaur remains have been found in the rocks that record even the final few thousand years before the impact. To have a specimen from the cataclysm itself would be extraordinary.Image caption,Sir David will review the discoveries, many that will be getting their first public viewing.
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 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.
"When we noticed there were inclusions within these little glass spherules, we chemically analysed them at the Diamond X-ray synchrotron near Oxford," explains Prof Phil Manning, who is Mr DePalma's PhD supervisor at Manchester. He's acted as another of the BBC's outside consultants. He wants to see the arguments presented in more peer-reviewed articles, and for some palaeo-scientists with very specific specialisms to go into the site to give their independent assessment.
"For some of these discoveries, though, does it even matter if they died on the day or years before? The pterosaur egg with a pterosaur baby inside is super-rare; there's nothing else like it from North America. It doesn't all have to be about the asteroid."There's no doubting the pterosaur egg is special.
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