A dramatic find in North Dakota has uncovered the first known victims of the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. An international team of paleontologists and geologists has found a massive collection of fossils of fish and other animal that were killed by a seismic sea wave and a shower of burning glass beads less than an hour after the asteroid strike off the shore of what is now Yucatan.
The mass extinction event caused by the impact of an asteroid or perhaps a comet at the end of the Cretaceous age that wiped out 75 percent of life on Earth is widely accepted, but for most people, it has a strangely abstract quality.
It’s easy to accept the idea of a giant object hitting the ocean, the massive shock waves and tsunamis and followed, as well as the concept of the sun being blotted out for years afterward, killing off plants and animals in a massive ecological chain of events. But much of it remains very clinical. It involves an ancient meteor crater on the Caribbean seabed, a sudden jump in iridium in the stratigraphy brought by the asteroid that created what is called the K-T boundary in the geological record, and an equally sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs, which had reined supreme on Earth for tens of millions of years.
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