FOSSIL OF DINOSAUR ‘KILLED IN ASTEROID STRIKE’ FOUND

Fri 08 April 2022:

Scientists claim to have discovered a well-preserved dinosaur leg from the period an asteroid struck the Earth.

A skin-covered limb of Thescelosaurus was discovered in a fossil site in Tanis, North Dakota, around 3,000 kilometers from the asteroid impact location in the Gulf of Mexico.

British archaeologists working at the site believe it was killed and entombed some 66 million years ago when an asteroid came down on the Earth, putting an end to the dinosaur age.

The dig has been filmed for a BBC documentary Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough, who will review the fossil finds.

“It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly, like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries,” Prof Paul Barrett, a world-leading expert on herbivorous dinosaurs from London’s Natural History Museum, told the BBC.

“This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly. There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being scavenged, such as bite marks or bits of it that are missing.”

“So, the best idea that we have is that this is an animal that died more or less instantaneously.”

The archaeologists also claimed to have discovered the fossilised remains of fish that breathed in debris from the asteroid.

Apart from that, the team discovered a fossil turtle skewered by a wooden spike, small mammal remnants and burrows, horned triceratops skin, a flying pterosaur embryo inside its egg, and what looks to be a fragment from the asteroid impactor itself.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent