Explore the history of our planet

The news of a marvel has recently brought me to the paleontology labs of the University of Kansas. There, I found myself staring at the fossilized bones of an old fish-spatula.

What had frightened me were the tiny glass beads caught in its gills, suggesting that the creature perished while sucking in the air as the fire rained down from the sky. The composition of these pearls, or tektites, further suggests that they were formed when a huge asteroid struck the Earth with the force of 10 billion Hiroshimas and ended the Cretaceous.

In other words, I was looking at a recording in rock of the moment when life had almost ended on Earth, arguably the biggest isolated event in the living history of our planet.

This fish is part of a fossil mine discovered by Robert DePalma, a graduate student at the University of Kansas, at a site in North Dakota. If the site were to contain everything DePalma claims, it would be one of the most important discoveries in history.

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DePalma's thesis advisor, David Burnham, showed me the fish and other artifacts buried in the fallout of the Tanis site. A decorated veteran of the university battlefield, Burnham did not seem to fear that some scientists have expressed doubts about extravagant claims.

"We are going to put our point of view in a number of newspapers over the next few years, and people will see what we have found," Burnham said. Everything is there, he assured me: evidence of catastrophic floods caused by seismic waves, of a pulverized bedrock falling like a hail, of forests on fire in a world conflagration, primitive mammals huddled in their burrow as dinosaurs died on the surface. He reiterated that scientists would unpack the treasures of Tanis for half a century.

One of the amazing of this era is the size of half a century. A young paleontologist working on the same sparse field 50 years ago could have dug up this fossil deposit without the knowledge to read his incredible story. The Apollo missions on the moon had just awakened the scientific community to the idea of ​​space as a kind of shooting range in which the Earth was the target of many incoming shots.

The fathers and sons of Luis and Walter Alvarez had not yet claimed that a strip of ash laden with iridium, a rare metal found in space debris, had covered the Earth about 65 million years ago. science would later reduce it about 66 million years ago). Alan Hildebrand and William Boynton had not yet identified the Chicxulub crater in the present Yucatan Peninsula as an asteroid impact site or a giant comet.

Indeed, it was not until 2010, according to a panel of scientists, based on crater samples, that an impact occurred 66 million years ago. Shockwaves have fallen on the planet, raining the fire and covering the Earth with ashes. This disaster marked the end of the age of the dinosaurs, extinguishing about 95% of all species and paving the way for the rise of mammals.

All of this is part of the advancement of science, which has gone from March to Gallop. Technology and globalization can shatter economies and ignite politics, but they are amazing accelerators of discovery. I could see it on Burnham's face when he was describing the plumage of a dinosaur discovered in Tanis – easily understandable feathers thanks to the discovery in the 1990s of exquisite feathered fossils in Liaoning, in China.

In a short period of time, he said, scanning electron microscopes will access traces of fossils that reveal the precise colors of these extinct ancestors of today's birds.