New Cambrian Discoveries

Scientists Find Fossilized Fish That May Have Been Blasted by Debris From Asteroid That Ended the Dinosaur AgeThis is freaking cool.

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around the world, layers of rock 66 million years old seem to contain excess iridium, presumably deposited by the Chicxulub impactor that struck near what is today the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Then there are tektites, small, glassy spheres of compressed and heated rock. Theoretically, there should also be fossilized evidence of animals killed by the asteroid’s effects.

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the description of a pair of sediment layers at the Tanis site of the The Hell Creek Formation in southwestern North Dakota. Both layers contain an excess of iridium, but only the lower level contains glass pieces that seemed to have been deposited from an inland-moving force. They take this to mean that they’re observing two events: The upper layer is the settling dust from after the impact. The lower is a large deposit of sediment from the hours following the impact.

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But the rocks at Tanis preserve a mixture of both freshwater fish, like paddlefish and sturgeon, and marine mollusks called ammonites”implying that around this time, the ocean had mixed with freshwater rivers. And lodged inside the fossilized paddlefish’s gills were more of the glass spherules. It appeared that waves containing shocked glass from the impact over 3,050 kilometers (1,895 miles) away had inundated the area, and in their dying breaths, the fish had inhaled some of them.

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A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Another article about this find. Astonishment, skepticism greet fossils claimed to record dinosaur-killing asteroid impactWe often see creationist dimwits claim scientists studying the history of life on this planet are brainwashed to unquestioningly support supposedly fraudulent claims.It is nice to see the actually reality concerning discoveries like these. Scientists are scrutinizing every bit of evidence questioning every conclusion.

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“Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology,” says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn’t a member of the research team. “Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused.” But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. The paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), does not include all the scientific claims mentioned in The New Yorker story, including that numerous dinosaurs as well as fish were buried at the site.

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“I hope this is all legit”I’m just not 100% convinced yet,” says Thomas Tobin, a geologist at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Tobin says the PNAS paper is densely packed with detail from paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and more. “No one is an expert on all of those subjects,” he says, so it’s going to take a few months for the research community to digest the findings and evaluate whether they support such extraordinary conclusions.

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