A dinosaur ‘tombstone’ lurks underneath New Jersey
The Big Sky country in western North America is a world -renowned dinosaur field. Household name dinosaurs as Tyrannosaurus rex And Triceratopsat the slightest known asshole Maiasaura Once, I ate, slept, laid the eggs and poop in this vast region of plains, rivers, lakes and mountains.
However, the eastern half of the continent should not be excluded when the desire to hunt fossils strikes. Take, for example, the often criticized state of New Jersey. The Garden State houses a rocky layer which is essentially a geological tombstone of the dinosaurs, preserving the remains of the planet Earth at a fairly crucial moment.
“What we have is a bone bed, and we can see that it is just at the end of the Cretaceous period,” explains Kenneth Lacovara, geologist and paleontologist at Rowan University Popular science. “So what we really have is the best window on the last moments of the dinosaurs that exist on the planet.”
Among his larger discoveries, Lacovara led the team who discovered the 60 -ton giant of 60 tonnes Dreadnoughts in Argentina which was presented in 2022 Jurassic World: Dominion. When they do not find new titanosaurs, Lacovara and other paleontologists have spent the last 17 years closer to his home, painting this square meter of the final bone by square meter. They have recorded more than 100,000 fossils, representing more than 100 species of plants and animals.
“All [of the fossils] From this final-cutting-cutting layer represents the extinction of dinosaurs, ”explains Lacovara.
Now, in a new museum and a new fossil park, citizen scientists can take the dirt themselves to help collect the puzzle in the way, when and why the greatest animals to have ever worked on earth have encountered their disappearance.
“ Bread in the pizza oven ”: the day the dinosaurs died
In recent decades, paleontologists have discovered several other details on the death of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. One day in the spring, an asteroid about 6 to 12 miles wide struck the waters of the current peninsula in eastern Mexico.
“From where I am in New Jersey, your first indication that something would have been wrong would have been about eight minutes and 37 seconds later. In our location, there would have been an earthquake of 10.3. An earthquake of 10.3 is larger than the earth.
This unprecedented earthquake would have stimulated mega tsunamis with waves of 2 miles high. It would also have been quite strong that 90 -ton sauropods and other mega dinosaurs would have been eliminated – when they died.
“If you are a huge sauropod dinosaur and fall, you will probably die, you are probably exploding,” explains Lacovara.
After the impact of the asteroid, the resulting crater would have been about 12 times the size of the Massachusetts state. The impact has probably made billions of millimeter degrees from energy, like the fire that comes out of a rocket.
“During the first hour after the impact, global temperatures get up somewhere between the Four Grille-Pain and the pizza oven,” said Lacovara. “So, if you are on the surface of the earth that day, if you had no room to hide, you are toast.”
Favor’s favorite dinosaurs Tyrannosaures Rex And Triceratops In the end, the impact of food shortages caused by debris blocking sunlight quickly or more slowly, other planetary upheavals. However, not all dinosaurs have really disappeared.
[ Related: How do we know what dinosaurs looked like? ]
Dinosaurs are birds and birds are dinosaurs
The first Jurassic A Romanesque film and according to 1993 introduced a general audience to the idea that birds are dinosaurs. According to Lacovara, there is now a generation of working planetologists that credit Jurassic With arouse their interest in paleontology and science. In addition, we have even more evidence in support of the fact that certain dinosaurs have evolved into birds.
“Birds are clearly dinosaurs,” says Lacovara. “To be considered a dinosaur, you must have the first dinosaur for an ancestor, and the birds do it. This is the same reason why we are mammals. We all have the first mammal for an ancestor, just like kangaroo, just like the blue whale, just like a hamster.”
It’s the same with birds, tiny swallows to flamingos or blue herons. These are dinosaurs who share the dinosaurs of common ancestor on two legs called theropods, which include giants like Tyrannosaurs And the smallest raptors. Or as Lacovara says, “a hummingbird is a dinosaur, to the same degree as T. RexOr a Stegosaurus is a dinosaur. »»
Paleontologists also have a better file of the evolution of feathers. Their first function was not theft, but rather insulation. The feathers adorning dinosaurs extinguished as Yutyrannus Hudi And various species of Raptor would probably have wooded something similar to the feathers fluffed on baby birds, instead of the flat locking feathers that have evolved later.
“It was not until later that some of these non -avian feathered dinosaurs started,” said Lacovara. “They had an arboreal lifestyle, and they started jumping from tree to tree.”
Why we love dinosaurs
While paleontologists have made jumps and limits to understand both how dinosaurs have lived and died, there is still much to learn about all the living things off, from the ammonites to the powerful megalodon.
To help discover even more in the fossil record, digging enthusiasts can visit the New Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University of Sewell, New Jersey. About 30 minutes apart from Philadelphia, the site offers the possibility of not seeing some bones closely and digging for their own discoveries in an old career. The park is a bit real Jurassic– Only without the threat of Velociraptors.
With a flow of films, documentary series such as DinosaursAnd books, the attraction of dinosaurs continues. This love goes further than the pleasure of digging up the bones of dinosaurs, fossilized poop or megaolodon teeth.
“I think it’s for a lot of reasons. For them, they were real. It’s not Godzilla or Bigfoot. These things were real, ”explains Lacovara.
As for children, undoubtedly the target audience of Real Edleman Fossil Park & Museum and Fictional Jurassic Park, Lacovara believes that dinosaurs often give children their first taste for expertise.
“For several years, we told them about everyone.” Here’s how to use a fork, here’s how to lock the door, here’s how to tie your shoes. “Now, for the first time, they tell other things that these others do not know,” he says.
Children also make excellent amateur fossil hunters, and take this expertise and apply it in the field can be quite exciting. Dig for fossils anywhere also opens fascinating avenues to discoveries both large and small – small brachiopods of the shell type in the wet soil with shark teeth and larger bones.
“When a child comes to the park of the fossils and finds this little clam shell or shark tooth with their own hands, it is a legitimate discovery. No human has ever seen this thing before. It is a little information that no human has never known this thing before, ”explains Lacavora. “So they become a legitimate explorer at that time. And who doesn’t want to be that?”
[ Related: Celebrate 30 years of Jurassic Park with these recent dinosaur discoveries. ]
What dinosaurs tell us about the future
While dinosaurs’ bones and their extinction story may seem relegated to the past, museums of natural history and paleontology offer us an important window for the future. Lacovara quotes the quote attributed to Winson Churchill, “the more you can look, the further you can see”, as an example of the good that paleontology gives to the world and how natural history museums offer an important conservation message.
“It is a lens through which we can contextualize our present moment to help us help us make better choices for the future,” he said. “People like what they know and people protect what they like. Our mission is therefore to connect people both to their old planet and their current planet. ”
It is a planet that has faced at least five waves of mass extinction and which is potentially in the cold handles of a sixth, which is motivated by human activity and not by a force of nature as a giant asteroid strike or volcanic eruptions.
“We have been here for a very short time. And what makes us think that we have a privileged position, that our place in the future is guaranteed? This is not the case, and the kind of future that we want for our posterity will only occur if we work for that, ”explains Lacovara. “This will not happen by accident.”
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