Inside final days of dinosaurs before fatal asteroid strike

Dinosaurs inhabited the Earth for millions of years until an asteroid the size of Mount Everest slammed the earth 66 million years ago, destroying them almost instantly.

Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough, a major new BBC documentary, employs cutting-edge special effects to recreate the beasts’ final 24 hours in incredible detail, hour by hour.

Robert DePalma, a palaeontologist and Manchester University graduate, has spent years searching for a prehistoric dinosaur “graveyard” in the North Dakota highlands.

The fossil location, which he has dubbed Tanis after the Egyptian city unearthed in the Indiana Jones film Raiders Of The Lost Ark, could be 2,000 miles from the Chicxulub Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, where the meteorite struck.

However, Robert, who has an Indiana Jones-like demeanour, believes the creatures were washed to their deaths in a tsunami and then entombed in silt, which explains why they are so beautifully preserved.

We show the incredible discoveries made by the researchers, which include a flying pterosaur embryo in its egg and a dinosaur fossil that may have been killed on the day the extinction asteroid struck.

Dinosaur Footprints

It’s not simply the discovery of fossilised animal remains that’s expanding our understanding of the period leading up to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Robert is now unearthing beautifully preserved footprints left by prehistoric species, which are also revealing clues.

His crew unearthed several footprints, including one 30cm-long specimen that is thought to belong to a duck-billed dinosaur.

Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Robert says: “They would have been very common in the Cretaceous period. They ate the plants in the area and they got very large – 30ft long.”

One track is particularly well preserved.

Robert says: “You even see a nail print at the tips of the toes, so the little toenails dug into the mud.

“I love this one.”

Robert’s prized footprint has three toes and is longer than wide, indicating that it came from a predatory dinosaur.

Sir David said: “Hell Creek is well known for one carnivore in particular – T-Rex. This footprint is too small for an adult T-Rex but it’s possible it was made by a young one.”

BBC / YouTube

T-Rex Tooth

The crown of a tooth is another fascinating finding uncovered by Robert at Tanis.

Sir David explains: “Its shape and serrated edge are indications it comes from an adult T-Rex.”

It was discovered embedded in the spine of a plant-eating dinosaur called a hadrosaur, showing that it hunted live prey.

Sir David added: “Bite marks found on T-Rex bones show that they also ate other T-Rexes.”

Fossilized turtle impaled by a stake

To assist liberate the full fossil of a turtle, Robert and his team employed ultra-cold liquid nitrogen.

The crew manages to bring the specimen out in one piece despite the heart-stopping situation.

CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

The turtle was likely impaled by a wooden stake – probably a tree branch – as a result of the asteroid’s impact, which triggered a tsunami of destruction throughout the earth.

Asteroid believed to have destroyed a leg of Thescelosaurus Robert and his colleagues are in a race against the clock to unearth a huge dinosaur burial.

A powerful storm is approaching, and if they do not act quickly, valuable evidence could be washed away — and lost forever.

Scientists are astonished to discover what they believe to be a one-of-a-kind specimen – the fossilised leg of a dinosaur that may have been killed on the tragic day the asteroid struck.

Professor Paul Barrett, head of Fossil Vertebrates at London’s Natural History Museum, analyses the leg, which reveals it belonged to a plant-eating thescelosaurus.

He said: “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 missing.

“It could well be that this was an animal that was there, being tumbled around, in its death throes in that river as a result of the asteroid impact.”

Skin from a Triceratops

Triceratops bones are quite abundant at the Hell Creek site, but finding fossilised skin in good form – as the scientists discovered on one specimen – is extremely rare.

Sir David says: “The size and the patterning of the scales, together with the age and the location of the rocks where it was found, strongly suggests this was from a triceratops.

“The brown colour contains traces of organic material, so it might even be possible from this to work out which pigments were in it.

JOEL CARRETT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

“Finding and studying such well-preserved fossils helps paleontologists build a much more detailed picture of how these creatures lived.”

Fossilized egg

Pterosaurs were flying creatures that lived alongside dinosaurs but were not dinosaurs themselves, and they became extinct at the same period.

Sir David says: “Male pterosaurs usually had crests, while the females didn’t, so crests may have been used in courtship displays.”

And we also know where female pterosaurs lay their eggs, thanks to evidence that one did so on the soft, sandy riverbank at Tanis.

Dr. Victoria Egerton, a paleobiologist and professor at Manchester University, discovered that the shell is soft, like that of a turtle, rather than rigid like that of most dinosaur eggs.

Very little is known about this type of pterosaur, the azhdarchid, and Dr Egerton says of the new discovery: “They were much more reptilian than bird-like and this can potentially tell us more about the environment these eggs were laid in.”

The sandy soil at Tanis would have been just soft enough for hatchlings to dig themselves out, according to Sir David.

Robert adds: “This probably had a wingspan of maybe 15ft. It’s easy to picture something like that hatching and later fluttering out, almost like a little bat.”

‘Bullet’ that killed the Dinosaurs

Specialist scans conducted in the United Kingdom have revealed something surprising about one of the tiny spherule particles seen in the gills of some fish. Iron, chromium, and nickel are all present.

Robert says: “The abundance of the three all together matches what you’d expect to see in a meteoritic body. That doesn’t match what you’d usually have down here.

“This could be a piece of the Chicxulub asteroid.”

Professor Phil Manning, chair of Natural History at Manchester University, adds: “This could be a piece of the bullet that killed the dinosaurs.”

Fist that absorbed impact debris from asteroid and amber resin

Hundreds of fossilised fish whose gills contain microscopic clay balls imply they perished soon after the asteroid hit are discovered among the thick layer of rock at Tanis by Robert and his crew.

They’re called ejecta spherules because they’re made up of boulders that were thrown into the air by the asteroid’s impact before raining down and becoming caught inside the fish’s gills.

Over millions of years, these tiny beads of molten glass have turned into clay, and Robert says: “They give us a fingerprint of where they came from.”

But he has to discover one that hasn’t gone to clay to unearth evidence of what happened that day, so the team looks for a spherule wrapped in fossilised amber.

Sir David says: “Anything covered by the resin would be frozen in an amber time capsule. A spherule preserved in amber could be analysed to see if it comes from the Chicxulub impact.”

They discover two surviving spherules, which Professor Manning of Manchester University analyses and finds compelling proof that Tanis and Chicxulub are linked.

Robert says: “Once you have that link and you know what impact affected Tanis, then you essentially know that everything buried in those sediments are linked to the last day of the Cretaceous.”

Real-life Indy digs up ‘new’ dinosaur

Dinosaur hunter Robert DePalma, dressed in a tattered brown fedora and khaki shirt with a sheathed knife slung from his belt, is every inch the modern-day Indiana Jones.

The 40-year-old palaeontologist has spent much of his professional life searching for answers to the 66-million-year-old cataclysm that wiped out prehistoric creatures.

DePalma was born in Florida, and his orthodontic father and great-uncle Anthony, an orthopaedic surgeon and father of famed film director Brian DePalma, instilled in him a passion with bones and teeth.

Robert would study bones left over from family meals when he was three years old. He showed Anthony a sliver of dinosaur bone he was given when he was four years old.

“He taught me all those little knobs and rough patches on a bone had names,” DePalma told the New Yorker. “I was captivated.”

He began excavating the North Dakota site Hell Creek in 2012 as a PhD student at the University of Manchester.

A new dinosaur species, the dakotaraptor, has been discovered, as well as the bones of dinosaurs that died when a large asteroid hit into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.

He prefers to dig with a World War II bayonet given to him by his uncle and dental instruments donated by his father, rather than contemporary ones.

Following his most recent discoveries at Hell Creek and his partnership with David Attenborough, the intrepid dinosaur hunter may soon be the focus of his own Hollywood film.

Is it time to call cousin Brian?

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