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K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card

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K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card

K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card
K-Pg Boundary Layer - Death of the Dinosaurs - Display Card

By the end of the Mesozoic, dinosaurs had ruled the Earth for 175 million years, evolving into innumerable forms across the years. All that ended with a six-mile-long asteroid that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs in one fell swoop.

Evidence of this impact can be found in a globally distributed strip of iridium, an element brought to Earth by the asteroid. This specimen is a collection of material from this K/Pg Boundary geologic layer, a relic from the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. The geologic sample has been cast in resin and affixed to an informational card with the Mini Museum Seal of Authenticity.

📸 (DINOSAURS NOT INCLUDED 😔)

THE END OF THE AGE OF DINOSAURS

The large-scale geological event known as the End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction had a profound influence on life on our planet. Three-quarters of all life on Earth perished during this time, from marine invertebrates like the ammonites, to the large avian and marine reptiles which had held their dominant place for so long, and of course the dinosaurs. In a geological instant, hundreds of non-avian dinosaur species, the product of more than 175,000,000 years of evolution, completely disappeared from the Earth.

Though there were multiple causes to this extinction, the arrival of the Chicxulub Impactor 66 million years ago dealt the final below to the Age of Dinosaurs.

📸 Luis and Walter Alvarez at the K-Pg Boundary in Gubbio, Italy 1981. (Source: Lawrence Berkeley Lab Archives)

THE CHICXULUB ASTEROID IMPACT

The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact (c. 66 million years ago) provides a dramatic exclamation point to the end of the Mesozoic. At a minimum, the Chicxulub impactor was 6 miles (9.6km) in diameter, and the energy released likely exceeded more than 100 million megatons.

Evidence of massive fires and mega-tsunamis traced to this event have been found in many areas of the world, as well as a fine layer of the element Iridium which is known today as the K-Pg Boundary Layer. The discovery of this global layer and the eventual hypothesis is credited to Nobel Laureate Dr. Luis Alvarez and his son Dr. Walter Alvarez.

This specimen is a resin strip of material that holds samples of the K-Pg Boundary Layer taken from across North America and Europe. The specimen comes affixed to its informational card that also serves as certificate of authenticity.

For anyone who loves dinosaurs, this is an incredible collector's item!

Please Note: the distribution of the material in each specimen will be unique.

📸 K-Pg Boundary Material

MORE ABOUT THE DEATH OF THE DINOSAURS

📸 Mass grave of fish carcasses, aligned by flow from "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota." by Robert DePalma (2019)

THE VIOLENT END OF THE MESOZOIC

Few aspects of deep history fascinate humankind as much as the death of the dinosaurs. Even today, new revelations, such as Dr. Robert DePalma's discovery of mass kill sites that may literally capture the very day of the Chicxulub impact, can dominate world headlines for weeks. Exploration of these discoveries is also, in many ways, challenging moments for science.

The current mainstream explanation for the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs derives from a theory proposed in 1980 by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Luis Alvarez, his son geologist Dr. Walter Alvarez, and several others. It is by all accounts the leading theory, but when it was released in 1980 it dropped on the establishment like a... well, like an asteroid colliding with the Earth.

📸 Infrared satellite data of the Chicxulub impact crater. (source: NASA)

Inspired by the presence of iridium—a metal rare in Earth’s crust but common in meteorites and the deep innards of planets—in the “boundary clay” layers found worldwide at the K-Pg transition, the Alvarez hypothesis suggested the massive impact of an extraterrestrial body—a bolide, in other words, an asteroid or comet—triggered the dinosaur-destroying extinction.

In the 1990s, this theory was buoyed by the discovery of the nearly 200-mile-wide Chicxulub crater along the northern Yucatan coast of Mexico, which roughly matches the 66-million-years-ago timestamp of the K-Pg extinction event. In the decades since, numerous panels have reviewed calculations, samples, and methods and most have come to the conclusion that the Alvarez theory must be correct and exclusive.

📸 Dr. Keller at Princeton with an Allosaurus unearthed in 1941. (Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly Photographer: Peter Murphy)

ANOTHER THEORY

Certainly, there is no doubt that a massive object collided with the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous. The latest research on the Chicxulub also suggests that the location of the primary impact was especially devastating. Sulfur aerosols released in mass quantities would make the atmosphere toxic and rapid ocean acidification due to increased carbon would mean death for marine species as well.

Yet if we've learned anything about life during the exploration of billions of years of history, it is that it is resilient in the face of overwhelming natural disasters. It really does find a way, at least in the short term. What truly impacts life on a grand scale is the march of time itself; the shifting of continents for example, and the large-scale effects of long-term climate change.

📸 Above: Late Campanian–Maastrichtian faunal and floral turnover, attributable to Deccan Traps volcanism (Source: Keller, Abramovich, 2003

Not long before the Alvarez team presented their impact hypothesis in 1980, paleontologist Dewey McLean had suggested the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was caused by a series of enormous volcanic eruptions that built the flood-basalt province of the Indian subcontinent known as the Deccan Traps.

Though the Deccan Traps theory has been majorly overshadowed by the impact hypothesis essentially since the latter’s inception, it’s had a fierce proponent for decades in the form of the Princeton University Professor of Geosciences Dr. Gerta Keller.

📸 "The effects of increasing environmental stress upon planktic foraminiferal assemblages." (Source: Keller, Abramovich, 2003)

Based on Dr. Keller's work with the unicellular marine organisms called foraminifera (or “forams,” for short)—which have left behind such an abundant and long-term fossil record that they’re something of a benchmark for tracking broader evolutionary trends—Keller contends the hundreds of thousands of years of Deccan Traps basalt floods were the primary driver of the K-Pg extinctions, not a bolide impact.

Like the Alvarez theory, Keller's work has a basis in a massive data set. For decades she and others tracked the gradual diminishment in foram vigor and diversity across 300,000 years before and after the K-Pg boundary. The data suggests that the drastic global impacts of the prolonged Deccan Traps eruptions—acid rain resulting from the basalt floods’ sulfur, global warming-induced by their carbon dioxide and methane, rains of ash, lead, and mercury, and the like—upturned ecosystems and spelled the demise of much of life on Earth, but in a more drawn-out fashion than the sudden space-rock annihilation favored by impact theorists.

FURTHER READING

Achenbach, Joel. “The Dissenter.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 6 June 2012.

Bosker, Bianca. “The Nastiest Feud in Science.” The Atlantic, 7 September 2018.

Brennan, Peter. “The ends of the world: Volcanic apocalypses, lethal oceans, and our quest to understand Earth's past mass extinctions.“ Harper Collins, (2017), 309 pp.

DePalma, Robert A., et al. "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.17 (2019): 8190-8199.

Keller, Gerta, and Sigal Abramovich. "Lilliput effect in late Maastrichtian planktic foraminifera: Response to environmental stress." Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 284.1-2 (2009): 47-62.

Lacovara, Kenneth. “Why dinosaurs matter.” Simon and Schuster, (2017), 163 pp.

Poling, Devereaux A., and E. Margaret Evans. "Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?: Developing concepts of death and extinction." Cognitive Development 19.3 (2004): 363-383.

Thomson, Keith Stewart. "Marginalia: Dinosaurs as a cultural phenomenon." American scientist 93.3 (2005): 212-214.

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