The controversy unfolding in the world of paleontology is epic drama you didn’t know you needed in your life. In this incredibly reported and compelling feature for Intelligencer, Kerry Howley digs up the dirt on two young scientists, Robert DePalma and Melanie During, who both claim to have found new evidence about one of the Earth’s biggest mysteries at Tanis, a paleontological site in North Dakota. Howley’s piece exposes paleontology as a “nasty” field of academia, full of mean and narcissistic people, but it sure makes for juicy reading.
It was before grass, before beans, before the 24-hour day. In film, this has been represented as a man gazing into the sky as a rock floats into his field of vision, but this is a confusion born of our inability to understand speed and scale. You would have not had a moment to turn toward the sky; as Brannen explains, the rock, six miles long, shot from the height of an airborne 747 to the ground in .3 seconds and continued onward toward the center of the Earth, 12 miles into crust. In its wake it left a vacuum that sucked in shattered and melted masses of this planet and shot them into space. The shock traveled through the oceans; tsunamis hundreds of feet tall rose skyward. Bits of earth, ejected into space, fell back through our atmosphere on fire, a rain of flame. The surface of the planet grew hot as an oven set to broil. T. rex, triceratops: These were not creatures designed to hide. A layer of iridium settled over the globe, to be buried by millions of years of sediment and discovered by Jan Smit 66 million years and a few weeks too late. In the same layer, known as the K-Pg Boundary, geologists would find tektites — bits of earth that shot into space when the asteroid hit, turned glassy with the heat of the atmosphere, and fell back to the surface. Smit called the smallest ones spherules. That DePalma claims to have found spherules all over Tanis is some of the strongest evidence for the site being a historical record of impact. Spherules appear in sediment like gnarled bits of clay. They look sometimes like BBs; when they’ve fused together, they look like Nerds.
