The asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater on Earth put an end to dinosaur dominance and ushered in the age of mammals. The 63 million-year-old catastrophe that wiped dinosaurs off the face of the Earth left nothing for palaeontologists to excavate from the time of the strike until recently. A shockingly well-preserved dinosaur limb has been unearthed, which is thought to date from the exact moment the asteroid collided with the Earth.
According to reports, the discovery at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota, USA, is a full limb with skin. The fossil was an incredible find because no other finds have ever shown remnants from the final few years before the impact, and finding a fossil from the day of the apocalypse had to be on the top of the list.
Furthermore, the archaeological community is ecstatic since this isn’t the only discovery from the same historical period. Fish, turtles, tiny animals, the embryo of a flying pterosaur within its egg, and skin from a horned triceratops have all been discovered by researchers.
‘We have got so many details with this site that tells us what happened moment by moment, it is almost like watching it play out in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day’, Robert DePalma, the lead at the Tanis dig said.
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