At one unusual site in North Dakota, fossil fish may hold a crucial piece of information about the fateful day
—lies on private ranch land within a tiny outcrop of the larger Hell Creek Formation, a series of rock layers that record hundreds of millennia leading up to the dinosaurs' extinction. In 2017 During, then a master’s student at the Free University Amsterdam, visited Tanis with a team that included Jan Smit, a paleontologist at the university, and Robert DePalma, the paleontologist who was leading excavations at the site.
Clues of this destruction can be found across the site. In one layer of sediment, the fish all face to the left; in the next layer up, they all face to the right, as if the fish had been sloshed around and buried as crashing waves repeatedly advanced and retreated. “I keep comparing it to a massive traffic-crash catastrophe, then just frozen in place,” During says.
The team also analyzed the bones’ growth patterns. Using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France,, During and her colleagues made CT scans of these bones. Their goal: to analyze in exacting detail how the bone’s microstructure varied with the seasons. “We applaud independent research work and analyses, and are pleased that these projects complement each other to lead to a richer understanding of the prehistoric world,” DePalma, a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Manchester, said in an emailed statement.
Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, notes that while the fish of Tanis undoubtedly show a seasonal signal, the Earth of 66 million years ago had less dramatic seasonal swings than the planet does today. Back then, there were no permanent polar ice caps, and deciduous forests ranged all the way to the poles.
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