An American paleontologist unearthed in North Dakota a mass "burial" of fish and mammals, which were apparently killed by a colossal tsunami from a meteorite that fell 66 million years ago.
This meteorite killed 75% of the living creatures of the Earth, including the cause of the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The trail from this meteorite can be seen even now, it is the Chicxulub crater with a diameter of 180 km in Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula.
The falling meteorite shook the surface of the planet monstrously and caused a huge tsunami, which also reached the territory of the present state of North Dakota and at once swept into one heap of fish, various mammals, small reptiles and dinosaurs.
According to scientists, the height of this tsunami reached at least 30 meters. The remains of animals were tightly packed with sedimentary rocks and therefore have survived to our times in the form of complete skeletons.
This place in North Dakota is called the Hell Creek Formation and paleontologist Robert De Palma began excavating here six years ago, suspecting that he might find something amazing here. And his suspicions were justified, he found a real "mass grave", where, mixed with plants, lay the remains of a wide variety of living creatures that died in an instant.
Robert De Palma is curator of paleontology at the Museum of Natural History in Palm Beach, Florida, and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas.
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According to De Palma, nothing like this has ever been found in paleontology before, because this is the first known mass "cemetery" with the remains of large life forms from the time of dinosaurs.
In those distant times, on the site of the Hull Creek Formation, there was an inland sea, in which almost all known marine life forms of that period lived, from mosasaurs to ammonite mollusks. But when, after a meteorite fell, a tsunami came here, it threw many fish into shallow water, including sturgeon, and then pelted them with very small balls, the so-called tektites.
Remains of fish.
Glass tektites found among the remains are the product of a meteorite melting after it falls to the surface.
De Palma discovered many tektites that had penetrated the paddlefish's gills. Probably the fish at that moment tried to swallow air in shallow water and kept its head above the surface. Tektites rained down on her with such force that they most likely killed her on the spot.
In addition to animal remains, burnt trees, insect remains, ammonites, mosasaurus and Triceratops bones were found at the site of the excavations.
