Friday, March 29

They find a dinosaur that died the day of the asteroid impact | Digital Trends Spanish

In 2019, an archeology team from the University of Manchester found a 66-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. The discovery was made at Tanis, an excavation site located about 3,000 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico, where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is believed to have impacted.

After a thorough investigation that has lasted since that year, scientists say that the remains correspond to the leg of a dinosaur, which still has pieces of skin, and that it could be a specimen that died the same day the asteroid hit. against Earth.

The authors of the study believe that the dinosaur to which the fossil belonged died and was buried that day, which also caused the general extinction of the species.

To make this discovery, scientists had to extract the remains of fish, sea turtles and smaller mammals that were also unearthed at the archaeological site and remained attached to the fossil. Scientists also found what appeared to be fragments of the Chicxulub asteroid.

After carrying out this kind of “cleaning”, the archaeologists concluded that what they had in front of them was the scaly thigh of a thescelosaurus.

“It looked like a regular thescelosaurus that had its leg ripped off really quickly. Scaly like lizards and featherless like their carnivorous contemporaries. However, there is no trace that the leg was torn off. So the best idea we have is that this fossil dinosaur lost its leg instantly from the impact of the asteroid,” says Phillip Manning, professor of natural history at the University of Manchester.

After analyzing the small rocks found in the fossil, the authors of the research confirmed that they corresponded with the radiometric dating of the asteroid. This suggests that the dinosaurs that were in a nearby area perished due to a rain of debris.

Publisher Recommendations










es.digitaltrends.com