10 Most Important Scientific Discoveries Of 2019
9. Archaeologists Discovered Organisms Killed The Day The Dinosaurs Died
We've known for a long time that the age of the dinosaurs came to a close some 65.76 million years ago, following the Chicxulub impact, which rained fire and death upon the world in a mass extinction. This has been noted due to the presence of iridium all over the world at the K-Pg boundary in strata, but finding organisms killed in that climactic event has proven difficult.
After all, very few animals are ever fossilized, and finding any that perished on a specific day millions of years ago is a pretty tall order. That was certainly true right up to the point in March when paleontologists described a site called Tanis, in North Dakota's Hell Creek Formation, which contained plants and animals killed on the day the planet was struck at Chicxulub.
Moments after the asteroid slammed into Earth, tiny glass beads rained down far to the north in what is now North Dakota. The tidal waves produced from the blast pushed animals and plants way out into the air before they fell to the Earth to be buried in sediment, and it's that sediment that preserved the organisms found at Tanis.
The site reflects an entire ecosystem impacted by that event, and instead of the small handful of fossils found elsewhere, there are an abundance of impacted organisms reflecting what took place at the end of the Cretaceous. In many ways, the find is a goldmine in the study of an extinction-level-event, and one that will require years of study to fully understand.