A story of a Very Bad Day, as told in fossils, with amber, iridium, tektites, seiches, and immense tsunamis.

https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/66-million-year-old-deathbed-linked-dinosaur-killing-meteor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpNMHwnxpC8

#history #palentology #meteroite #chicxulub #northdakota

Today in "What the hell are you talking about Avaris?" I noticed something weird about the US river systems... namely that a lot of them spread out like cracks from the Gulf of Mexico. Not only that but the Mississippi and Missouri rivers lead up to some of the best dinosaur dig sites in the US... which got me wondering if these paths have any relation to Chicxulub or if it's pure coincidence.

#randomthoughts #paleontology #chicxulub #dinosaurs #rivers

Brought out from a discussion elsenet: would Earth now be warm enough to support large, #nonavian #dinosaurs today? This is a fair question, because as bad as global warming is—and it's going to get worse—we're still nowhere near the hottest times of the #Mesozoic.

The answer is, it was *generally* warmer than the present day, but #global #temperatures went up and down considerably, as you'd expect over such a long stretch of time—about 175 million years from the first dinosaurs to the #Chicxulub impact. Dinosaurs as a #clade did fine the whole way through, although of course with plenty of various groups dying out in the meantime.

Also, the planet has always had warmer and cooler regions. Many large dinosaurs lived comfortably in polar regions that had #climates comparable to the cooler parts of the temperate zones today. The idea that non-avian dinosaurs exclusively inhabited steaming jungles or baking deserts has been embedded by generations of paleoart, but it's just wrong. If the impact hadn't happened, they'd still be thriving.

That being said, #sauropods in particular seemed to prefer warmer environments, so their range might be a lot more limited now than it was then, and it's possible the ice age(s) would have finished them off. Other famous giants like #tyrannosaurs, #ceratopsians, and #hadrosaurs would still be widespread, and smaller ones like #dromaeosaurs ("raptors") would be as numerous as coyotes and wildcats are in our world.

The discovery of #Chicxulub, which supports the dino-killing asteroid theory is a fun read. A non-academic and a journalist announced a result, but all the leading academics were not paying attention. Eventually their validation was accepted but took a decade to be heard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Discovery

> Penfield also recalled that part of the motivation for the name was "to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it" after years of dismissing its existence.[

#scicomm