
The Day the Dinosaurs Died - Deinos
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died
======
abhinai
The story of this guy is very inspiring. Unlike silicon valley engineers who
tend to work hard in anticipation of big payouts, this guy has been working
hard for years for his seemingly true passion of paleontology. We need more
people like him in every field and especially in the silicon valley.

~~~
dukoid
I think there are enough high quality open source or research projects to show
that it's not only about the payouts in our field either...

One thing I find remarkable in this story: extensively working in the field
(=literally/outside) -- opposed to following conventional "publish or perish"
advice advancing his PhD in a more predictable manner...

------
D-Coder
Shorter version of this article with much less of the personal history:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/science/dinosaurs-
extinct...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/science/dinosaurs-extinction-
asteroid.html).

------
btilly
td;lr

Unknown of paleontologist spent several years digging up a site which records
the K-T impact. Complete with whole fossils, raining debris from the meteor,
the whole 9 yards. The site includes a variety of animals, including
dinosaurs, who died on that day. We can even place the time of year from the
plant fossils.

A well-known science journalist has been to the site and verifies that he
isn't making it up.

The paleontologist's working assumption was that it was the result of a
tsunami. However it appears instead to be the result of a seiche - the
earthquake from the meteor sloshing water back and forth, destroying
everything. So the entire site captures the last hour of the K-T zone. (Plus
one random mammal that tunneled into the site some time later and died in its
burrow.)

This is one of the most important paleontological sites ever found.

------
Fomite
Twitter thread talking about some holes in this story:
[https://twitter.com/Laelaps/status/1111749308884279296](https://twitter.com/Laelaps/status/1111749308884279296)

~~~
blfr
I stopped reading and started skimming at the complaint that DePalma dresses
like Indiana Jones. Good. It would behoove many professions to dress well
again. I hope this age of slob ends soon.

And what's with the indigenous people non-sequitur? There were no people,
indigenous or elsewhere, 60 million years ago.

~~~
edoloughlin
_I stopped reading and started skimming at the complaint that DePalma dresses
like Indiana Jones_

That's a shame, it's actually a good article. However, how would you dress if
you had to spend hours a day on your belly under the desert sun? Perhaps it's
just a practical way to dress and the journalist was just exercising some
artistic license?

~~~
ggsp
I think they are saying that they stopped reading the Twitter posts, not the
article.

~~~
fhars
And the twitter thread is what is good and should be read.

The piece in the NewYorker makes it look like DePalma's work makes a
substantial contribution to our understanding of the extinction of the
dinosaurs, while the twitter thread (and
[https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714](https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714)
cited therein) point out that the actual paper published about the discovery
doesn't even mention dinosaours and that DePalma is just acting as "a pulp
novel caricature of a paleontologist" following the established script of "Go
to the press, get your fame, let the academics argue while the public goes
'Wowwww'". All the while violating the embargo on the paper.

~~~
mcguire
If science by press release is bad, how is science by Twitter better?

~~~
Fomite
Twitter is discussing things, not making a sensational PR claim.

------
Latteland
What does he have to do to earn his phd? It cannot be that every
paleontologist has to make an incredible discovery that shines forever. My CS
Phd was not like that. Why hasn't just a few of these things been enough for
this fellow to get his PhD, if there is anything to it.

~~~
garmaine
Write a thesis.

~~~
unixhero
And that ain't for everyone.

~~~
Latteland
But that's how you get your PhD in this world. A very very few people get one
for meaningful papers.

------
interfixus
This smells slightly off. A bit too smooth, a bit too fortuitous, a bit too
jackpot, a bit too good to be quite true.

If it _is_ what it claims to be, then hats off and wow, incredible find and a
true milestone. But until until the whole process of papper and peers is well
under way, I shall take the story with a wagonload of salt.

------
smarri
This is also a brilliantly written article.

~~~
andrewflnr
I should hope so, the author has multiple published novels. _Tyrannosaur
Canyon_ is the one mentioned in passing in the intro.

------
mlochbaum
Uh, hello? This is not "front page of HN for a day" 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'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'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.

I'm not a scientist or anything. I'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's huge. Read the New Yorker article, and [1].

It's okay to take issue with the way these findings have been presented, but
there'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'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/39Ar, the current most precise method.

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's
nearly impossible to even find a word written about the man. It'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's worth noting that [3] gives an Ar/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.

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'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's behavior and posture as well.

That said, there are dinosaurs. The site contains "dinosaur tracks from two
species, says Jan Smit" ([2]; also mentioned in scientific source [3]). The
Berkeley press release [1] says Smit mentionsed the "buried body of a
Triceratops and a duck-billed hadrosaur", although it doesn't go into detail
about condition or say whether the hadrosaur is complete or fragmentary (the
Triceratops is a "partial carcass"). And given that all the author'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.

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.

Popular press:

[1] [https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-
dea...](https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/29/66-million-year-old-deathbed-
linked-to-dinosaur-killing-meteor/)

[2] [http://bambinidisatana.us/2017/01/27/devastation-
detectives-...](http://bambinidisatana.us/2017/01/27/devastation-detectives-
try-solve-dinosaur-disappearance/)

GSA presentations:

[3]
[https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2016AM/webprogram/Paper284267.htm...](https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2016AM/webprogram/Paper284267.html)

[4]
[https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305713.htm...](https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305713.html)

[5]
[https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305627.htm...](https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper305627.html)

~~~
njarboe
This sure looks like the real deal and I'm looking forward to the PNAS article
that is coming out next week, "Prelude to extinction: a seismically induced
onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota". It is a bit
disappointing that these press articles are coming out before people can read
the science journal article. Don't see any pre-prints anywhere.

~~~
gwern
Here:
[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116)
"A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North
Dakota", DePalma et al 2019

> The most immediate effects of the terminal-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact,
> essential to understanding the global-scale environmental and biotic
> collapses that mark the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, are poorly resolved
> despite extensive previous work. Here, we help to resolve this by describing
> a rapidly emplaced, high-energy onshore surge deposit from the terrestrial
> Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Associated ejecta and a cap of iridium-rich
> impactite reveal that its emplacement coincided with the Chicxulub event.
> Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules
> in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a
> deeply incised river channel before accretion of the fine-grained impactite.
> Although this deposit displays all of the physical characteristics of a
> tsunami runup, the timing (<1 hour postimpact) is instead consistent with
> the arrival of strong seismic waves from the magnitude Mw ∼10 to 11
> earthquake generated by the Chicxulub impact, identifying a seismically
> coupled seiche inundation as the likely cause. Our findings present high-
> resolution chronology of the immediate aftereffects of the Chicxulub impact
> event in the Western Interior, and report an impact-triggered onshore mix of
> marine and terrestrial sedimentation—potentially a significant advancement
> for eventually resolving both the complex dynamics of debris ejection and
> the full nature and extent of biotic disruptions that took place in the
> first moments postimpact.

~~~
njarboe
Thanks for the link. This should be fun reading. Published April 1, 2019.

------
siquick
I'd love to see a video of the recreation of the event they describe if anyone
has a link to it?

~~~
duncans
[http://folk.uio.no/galeng/Movies/Cx45e_rho_tev_S.gif](http://folk.uio.no/galeng/Movies/Cx45e_rho_tev_S.gif)
(from
[http://folk.uio.no/galeng/research.html](http://folk.uio.no/galeng/research.html))

~~~
solstice
When temperature is measured in electronvolt you know things are serious...

------
elliotec
How did our ancestors survive such catastrophic conditions?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Our ancestors at the time were small shrew-like creatures. The extinction
event occurred in several phases. The immediate impact directly devastated the
local region and created a mega-tsunami that spread yet more destruction. It
also kicked up a huge amount of debris which then re-entered Earth's
atmosphere around the world over the course of the next roughly hour or so.
This would have heated most of the atmosphere to the temperature of an oven,
sparking massive wildfires and killing off most land animals. The ash and
other crud injected into the stratosphere (such as sulfur dioxide) would have
stuck around for several years and reduced the effective insolation at the
Earth's surface substantially, causing massive die-off of plants and a
contraction of primary productivity (biomass creation) across the globe
(effectively a "great depression" in the food web).

Many aquatic animals would have been able to survive the initial effects but
would have been put in quite a pinch by the reduction in food that set in
after. As mentioned, large land animals on the surface would have been mostly
wiped out pretty quick, many of the rest would have starved as the one two
punch of massive fires and reduced sunlight (and possibly global cooling)
would have produced. Small animals that lived or took refuge underground (or
perhaps were aquatic or semi-aquatic) could have survived the initial effects
in large numbers and though they would have diminished in population in the
hard times afterward could have eked through.

Scrappy little omnivores and/or scavengers would have been well suited to ride
the waves of chaotic changes following the mass extinction.

~~~
ip26
Basically, rats. Which is probably surprising to no one.

~~~
interfixus
> _Finally, he showed me a photograph of a fossil jawbone; it belonged to the
> mammal he’d found in the burrow. “This is the jaw of Dougie,” he said. The
> bone was big for a Cretaceous mammal—three inches long—and almost complete,
> with a tooth_

7 cm jawbone. Some rat, that.

~~~
nn3
The mammal mentioned in the article was a marsupial, so not in our ancestral
line. Marsupials have split from the eutherians (to which we belong) long
before the C-T boundary. At C-T there were already early primates, which is
our closer family.

A fascinating story about this is in Baxter's "Evolution" book which starts
with a little primate at the CT boundary and traces the history of the family
to modern humans.

------
throwaway5752
tl;dr's aside, this is a _fantastic_ article and should be read in it's
entirety.

I must say, "formidable paleontologist" Jack Horner comes off as a royal
a-hole:

 _" But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he
didn’t remember him: “In the community, we don’t get to know students very
well.”"_

~~~
throwaway5752
You get the feeling that Robert DePalma might be the Andrew Wiles of
paleontology. It's kind of rare when you read something in plain sight - in
the New Yorker - and you recognize it should be much, much bigger news than it
is.

~~~
throwaway5752
I'll stop here, but this is a bit of an avocation of mine, and this is
unthinkably amazing. To think something like this existed... I almost think
there has to be catch, because it's too good to be true.

 _" He planned to remove the entire burrow intact, in a block, and run it
through a CT scanner back home, to see what it contained. “Any Cretaceous
mammal burrow is incredibly rare,” he said. “But this one is impossible—it’s
dug right through the KT boundary.” Perhaps, he said, the mammal survived the
impact and the flood, burrowed into the mud to escape the freezing darkness,
then died. “It may have been born in the Cretaceous and died in the
Paleocene,” he said. “And to think—sixty-­six million years later, a stinky
monkey is digging it up, trying to figure out what happened.” He added, “If
it’s a new species, I’ll name it after you.”"_

and

 _" The block told the story of the impact in microcosm. “It was a very bad
day,” DePalma said. “Look at these two fish.” He showed me where the
sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony plates on its back—had been forced into the
body of the paddlefish. One fish was impaled on the other. The mouth of the
paddlefish was agape, and jammed into its gill rakers were
microtektites—sucked in by the fish as it tried to breathe. DePalma said,
“This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long
enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.”"_

~~~
GuiA
That's the mind blowing thing about fossils. The chances of one forming are
one in millions... but there have been so many living organisms on Earth that
finding them turns out to be pretty trivial. One of my most mind blowing
memories as a child involves tripping on a rock in my grandparents' yard,
pulling it out, and revealing on its surface the perfect carbon imprint of
some fern-like looking plant.

And then we have the one in a million chance of finding the one in a million
site, which leads to what the article describes. Pretty awesome.

~~~
throwaway5752
Ah, it's a bummer, but sounds like there is reason for skepticism:
[https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714](https://twitter.com/SteveBrusatte/status/1111669545285107714)

~~~
pfdietz
That the first paper doesn't talk about dinosaurs is reason for skepticism? He
didn't tell us everything in the first paper, therefore it's probably
bullshit?

Please.

~~~
throwaway5752
I didn't say that. But that link I provided was a working paleontologist, so I
figured his skepticism was worth noting. I couldn't tell you if it's bullshit
or not, as a non-expert in the field.

------
HocusLocus
Last Day of the Dinosaurs, good CGI re-creation

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10wog2](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10wog2)

My letter on a related topic

[https://www.scribd.com/document/374712301/20180227-David-
L-G...](https://www.scribd.com/document/374712301/20180227-David-L-Goldfein-
Letter-SC)

------
sarosh
Are there any KT exeperts that can comment on the article?

~~~
JetSpiegel
Yes, they are quoted on the article itself.

------
ixtli
This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever heard. Definitely listen
to the whole thing.

------
stebann
Amazing discovery. What pieces of the evolution puzzle and history of life on
earth are still left to discover?

------
mannykannot
While I do find this fascinating (if it holds up), there is so much prior
evidence for the impact, and for its devastating consequences globally, that
this is unlikely to change the course of paleontology.

~~~
btilly
I disagree. And here are reasons.

1\. It settles a question of whether the dinosaurs were already gone.

2\. It let's us know what time of year the impact was.

3\. We are literally seeing everything in that ecosystem. It is very, very
rare to get a fossil record that shows us a whole ecosystem. (The best known
example of mass fossils, tar pits, are very heavily biased towards scavengers.
Mudslides will preserve a complete ecosystem, but usually not with the same
quantity and quality as this one.)

4\. For species after species you have complete preservation. Including soft
tissue, body shape, skin, and so on.

5\. He found tektites in amber. That is, we have pieces of the meteorite
preserved in a substance that would preserve their chemical makeup. Once
analyzed this will give us direct information about the meteorite that killed
the dinosaurs that we could not have received any other way. For example we
could learn whether it was a comet from the Oort cloud versus an asteroid from
the inner solar system.

6\. The quality of preservation is such that we not only can identify dinosaur
feathers, we can identify where on the body those specific feathers came from.

7\. The quality of soft tissue preservation is such that we can identify the
diet that some of the animals ate.

8\. The fact that the ammonite shell was initially pink upon being excavated
suggests that we may be able to learn about the color of some of these things.
Evidence of color is very hard to come by.

If the story holds up, this site is important for a lot of reasons beyond
adding to the evidence for a meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs. And if this
is a partial list that is obvious now, I am sure that the list will get much,
much longer.

~~~
mannykannot
These are all valid reasons for saying that this is an important site, but
only 1, 2 and 5 can tell us something about the extinction event itself.

~~~
garmaine
Most of the pressing paleontological questions are not about the extinction
event itself.

