The Day The Dinosaurs Died

0:01I'm Aisha Roscoe and you're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. About 66 million years ago, something huge happened on our planet. It's known as the fifth mass extinction event, and it wiped out some 50 % of plants and animals on Earth. You probably know the basics of the story. An asteroid struck and killed off all the dinosaurs. But recently, scientists have been uncovering more details about what really happened at that pivotal moment in history. Mantua, New Jersey, is the site of a new paleontology museum and fossil dig site where scientists are discovering exciting new clues about what happened in the days and even hours after the asteroid hit.

0:53The Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University opened this spring to the public, and now anyone who visits has the chance to go down into the quarry to find fossils themselves. When we come back, we go to the fossil site and find out what happened on that fateful day. Stay with us.

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2:47Manoush, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks, Aisha. Glad to be here. So you visited the dig site and the museum before it was open to the public. You got a little sneak preview. And you got a tour from Ken Lacovara, the renowned paleontologist who founded the museum. What was that like? It was a big surprise, Aisha, because this site is tucked behind a strip mall. It is New Jersey, after all. So there's like a Lowe's hardware store and a Chick-fil-A. and you drive around the bend behind the mall, and there's this beautiful museum with a huge pit in front of it. And Ken took me down into the pit, and you're there, and you're like, well, there's just a pile of dirt down here, right?

3:33But actually, it is full of tiny fossils, mostly of sponges and clams and snails and oysters, but also bone fragments of turtles, sharks, mosasaurs, and even, yes, an occasional dinosaur. Wow. I mean, that's incredible because anybody would want to find a little dinosaur piece, right? Mm-hmm. So how did Ken first discover this site in New Jersey? So Ken's actually a Jersey boy, but he spent most of his career traveling all around the globe, discovering some of the biggest fossils ever, including a dinosaur in Argentina that he named Dreadnoughtus. It is bigger than the T-Rex. Anyway, so about 20 years ago, Ken decides to come home and become a professor at nearby Rowan University in New Jersey.

4:27And then he hears about this site. It's a mining quarry. So he starts taking his students down there to get some digging experience, see what they can find. and they would follow the bulldozers around to see if any fossils would turn up, and occasionally they would. And then finally, in 2007, he rented a corner of the pit and he really excavated it, like, properly. And that is when he realized he had a huge discovery on his hands. Well, what did he find? Well, at the bottom of the pit, Ken discovered a 66-million-year-old bone bed. This is a six-inch deep layer of dirt that runs across the width of the quarry with over 100 ,000 fossils from 100 different species from the Cretaceous period.

5:17So Ken calls this the extinction layer. This bone bed, Aisha, essentially documents the day that the asteroid hit the Earth and caused the fifth extinction. It is the most significant intact fossil record to date of the death of the dinosaurs. I mean, I did not know all these details of what researchers think happened that day. Is it OK if I play you an excerpt from our episode? Yes, absolutely. Let's listen. The ground is teeming with fossils, if you know how to look for them. So most of them are invertebrate fossils, clams, snails, oysters, things like that. We'll have turtles and sharks and mosasaurs and bony fish, the rare dinosaur.

6:06But in addition to all those fossils, the other key thing that Ken and his team have unearthed is a metal called iridium that's usually only found in asteroids. can explain the latest thinking on exactly what happened that day, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into the Earth. The asteroid impact happens 1 ,500 miles away from here, off the Yucatan Peninsula in what is now Mexico. It blasts a crater in the Earth's crust that's about 110 miles across by 12 miles deep. So that's roughly the size of Massachusetts. say. Eight and a half minutes after the asteroid hits, a magnitude 10.3 earthquake rolls across the continent, probably knocking the largest dinosaurs down.

7:02But the deadliest moment comes about 16 minutes after the asteroid. All that material is blasted up through the atmosphere, goes in the low earth orbit, is pulverized into maybe millimeter-sized pieces, but it still has all the mass. So you've given that mass a tremendous amount of potential gravitational energy. When that stuff comes back in, it's got to balance the energy books. And the result that day, within the first hour, is global temperatures get up somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven. So the dinosaurs that have dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems for 165 million years, I think are functionally extinct within an hour after that impact.

7:44An hour? Do we know that for sure? Well, here's what we know. I mean, all dinosaurs lived on land. Well, that day, if you can't do what little mammals did, or crocodiles, or lizards, or turtles, if you can't get into a burrow somewhere, dig underground somewhere, well, it's between toaster oven and pizza oven, you die on the surface of the earth that day if you don't have a place to hide. And it doesn't look like the dinosaurs had a place to hide. Were there a few stragglers that, you know, maybe were at the mouth of a cave, or, you know, swimming at the time? Sure. But I think they were functionally extinct at that moment.

8:20Several hours later, Ken says a tsunami likely over 130 feet high would have crashed into the coast right here, sweeping the dead dinosaurs out to sea where they'd sink down to the ocean floor, creating a bone bed. A bone bed that is from the exact moment of the asteroid impact. In fact, it's the only place in the world where you can see a complete death assemblage of many, many species that are victims of that event with the fallout from the asteroid. We walk around the site to get a different vantage point. And Ken says that the fallout from the asteroid, tiny pieces of it, have been found in over 350 sites around the world.

9:07But just from the ash, just from the material that falls from the sky. To date, the fossil occurrences in that layer have been very, very meager. There's some fish scales in Belgium. There's a pile of paddlefish and a dinosaur leg in North Dakota. That's about it. This site here that you're looking at has an entire collapsed ecosystem at that moment. We've recovered over 100 ,000 fossils, representing over 100 species. and they are interbedded with the fallout from that impact that happened off the coast of Mexico. So we have little glass spherules that rain down from the sky, little grains of what we call shocked quartz, and we have a spike in the level of the metal iridium, which is very, very rare in the crust of the Earth, but very much more abundant in asteroids.

9:53And so this makes this the best window on the planet into that pivotal calamitous moment that wiped out the dinosaurs and really made the modern world as we know it. Why here? Well, I mean, it was everywhere. We happened to have those deposits preserved here, and then we had a quarry here because of the mining operation since the first one of those that had been found. Are there any others? Oh, there must be. You could probably go under the Lowe's and find these same deposits, or the Chick-fil-A. How do you stop yourself from just, like, wanting to dig up everywhere here? Well, I kind of do, but, you know.

10:28It's taken us 14 years to excavate only 250 square meters. and these fossils are very important to science and so we you know we excavate these for ourselves but for future scientists as well and so we have to document everything very carefully curate the material very carefully make sure it's preserved forever so that scientists 200 years from now can study these same fossils

11:00I did not realize it happened that fast like that right shocking I thought it was like months maybe a year or two and that the world could get that hot that fast I mean it I really it makes me think of like the land before time you know that oh yeah I love that show it's just like oh my gosh So what's the bigger picture here? Like, what does Ken LaCovara hope people come away with after visiting this museum and the fossil site? Yeah, so the museum and the pit, they just opened to the public. And what he really wants is people to come and touch the Earth and really get a sense of just how long this planet has been around.

11:47You know, this idea of deep time. Ken likes to use this analogy. So like, let's say you have a thousand page book that represents the entire history of the planet. When it comes to the human experience, he says we would be the last word, the last word in the whole book. That is how limited our time here has been. And even though we haven't been here for very long, we humans have used that short time to wreak havoc. And he says we have actually started the next mass extinction with climate change. But he thinks that if you love something, if you know something, you will work to protect it. And he hopes to help people get to know and love planet Earth.

12:31OK, well, that is a beautiful sentiment. Right? Yes. I have to ask, when you were there, did you find a fossil? Well, yes. I needed a little coaching from Ken, to be honest. So let's hear my big moment here. Yes, let's do that. So what do I do? Well, so you're looking for things that used to be alive. So you want to look for the hallmarks of life, which is pattern, form, symmetry. tree. If you find something that looks like a random clump of dirt, it's probably a random clump of dirt, right? Okay. So there are fossils right here. I see some fossils right here. You see them just like... I do. I see fossils everywhere.

13:15So there you go. You found your fresh fossil. That's it? That was easy. This is a fossil sponge. So a sponge is a little filter feeding organism that lives on the seafloor. They draw in water and they have these little cilia, these little hairs, and they filter feed what's in the water. And you just found a 66 million year old fossil spawn. What? Yep. That's amazing. Oh, that's crazy. Right? I mean, 66 million years old and you're holding it in your hands? Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, that, like, to be able to touch history like that, it has to be really cool. Like, what effect did it have on you?

14:00I think it had exactly that effect. touching the earth. It was almost too easy, Aisha. Like I reached down and there it was. And there's this crazy time travel that happens that you are holding this moment of life that has existed in the dirt, like in your hand. He wants to give that to everyone, especially kids, and start to feel this connection to time, to history, to the planet, really in a tactile way. And that is exactly what I got. Well, thank you, Manoush, for sharing this with us. I learned a lot. Oh, good. Yes, I did too. You have to take your kids, Aisha. It's amazing. I will. I'll try to convince them.

14:41I got family in Jersey, so we'll see. Perfect. Yes. That's Manoush Zomorodi. She is the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. To learn more about paleontologist Ken Lacovara's work at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum, check out their episode, The Day the Dinosaurs Died. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and Harsha Nahada with help from James De La Husi. It was edited by Liana Simstrom and Sanaz Meshkampur. Jimmy Keely mastered the episode. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Jennifer Schmidt. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.

15:32Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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