Scientists have discovered a fossil of a perfectly preserved dinosaur leg that may have been ‘ripped off’ by the asteroid that sparked a mass extinction.
The find is extraordinary because the Thescelosaurus is thought to have been killed by the asteroid that brought around the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
The specimen was found at a fossil site in Tanis, North Dakota, 3,000km miles away from the asteroid impact site in the Gulf of Mexico.
The remains of animals and plants seem to have been rolled together into a sediment dump by enormous waves created by collossal earth tremors.
A fossil turtle that was skewered by a wooden stake was also discovered alongside the skin from a horned triceratops and a possible fragment from the asteroid itself.
The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on 15 April, narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
“We’ve got so many details with this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like watching it play out in the movies. You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day,” says Robert DePalma, the University of Manchester, UK, graduate student leading the Tanis dig.
Speaking about the perfectly preserved dinosaur leg, Professor Paul Barrett from London’s Natural History Museum, said: “It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries.
“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 of it that are missing.
“So, the best idea that we have is that this is an animal that died more or less instantaneously.”
Professor Steve Busatte from Edinburgh University remained sceptical of the discovery and called for more peer-reviewed study of the specimen.
Prof Busatte posits the theory that the dinosaur and other animals had died before the asteroid struck, was exhumed by the impact and then buried again in a way that made their deaths appear concurrent.
“Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they’re an absolute calling card for the asteroid. But for some of the other claims - I’d say they have a lot circumstantial evidence that hasn’t yet been presented to the jury,” he told the BBC.
