{"id":3852,"date":"2019-03-31T22:00:33","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T04:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/?p=3852"},"modified":"2019-03-31T22:00:33","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T04:00:33","slug":"the-day-the-dinosaurs-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/?p=3852","title":{"rendered":"The Day the Dinosaurs Died"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2019\/04\/08\/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/cruithni.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/03\/190408_r34032.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He recalled the moment of discovery. The first fossil he removed, earlier that summer, was a five-foot-long freshwater paddlefish. Paddlefish still live today; they have a long bony snout, with which they probe murky water in search of food. When DePalma took out the fossil, he found underneath it a tooth from a mosasaur, a giant carnivorous marine reptile. He wondered how a freshwater fish and a marine reptile could have ended up in the same place, on a riverbank at least several miles inland from the nearest sea. (At the time, a shallow body of water, called the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the proto-\u00adGulf of Mexico up through part of North America.) The next day, he found a two-foot-wide tail from another marine fish; it looked as if it had been violently ripped from the fish\u2019s body. \u201cIf the fish is dead for any length of time, those tails decay and fall apart,\u201d DePalma said. But this one was perfectly intact, \u201cso I knew that it was transported at the time of death or around then.\u201d Like the mosasaur tooth, it had somehow ended up miles inland from the sea of its origin. \u201cWhen I found that, I thought, There\u2019s no way, this can\u2019t be right,\u201d DePalma said. The discoveries hinted at an extraordinary conclusion that he wasn\u2019t quite ready to accept. \u201cI was ninety-eight per cent con\u00advinced at that point,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Fascinating.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2019\/04\/08\/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died\">The Day the Dinosaurs Died<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. He recalled the moment of discovery. The first fossil he removed, earlier that summer, was a five-foot-long freshwater paddlefish. Paddlefish still live today; they have a long bony snout, with which they probe murky water &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/?p=3852\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Day the Dinosaurs Died<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darknessovertheland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}