Dinopocalypse Redux

May 2, 2019

Using high-powered ballistics experiments, fancy computer algorithms, and good old-fashioned ancient geology, scientists have woven together a theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs that is so precise, so hot, so instantaneous, as to seem unimaginable. Today, we bring you this story, first published on Radiolab in 2013, plus an update: a spot on planet Earth, newly discovered, that - if it holds true - has the potential to tell us about the first three hours after the dinos died.

This update was reported by Molly Webster and was produced with help from Audrey Quinn.

We teamed up with some amazing collaborators for Apocalyptical, the Radiolab live show that this episode is based on. Find out more about these wildly talented folks: comedians Reggie Watts, Patton Oswalt, Simon Amstell, Ophira Eisenberg and Kurt Braunohler; musicians On Fillmore and Noveller, and Erth Visual & Physical Inc.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

To learn more about the North Dakota site - known as Tanis, for all you Indiana Jones fans - check out the recent paper. Make sure you spend time digging into those supplemental materials, it contains all the juice !

And, go watch Apocalyptical; to dinosaurs and beyond!

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wait you're listening to Radio Lab radio from WNYC hey and NPR ladies and Gentlemen please welcome to the stage your host for this evening Jad a Baretta Robert krulwich I'm Jedi boom Rod I'm Robert krulwich this is Radiolab and a while back we were on stage we were live at the Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle this was several years ago be called that show apocalyptical because it was about endings different kinds of endings of different things it was a show that we did with all of these incredible musicians and video

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artists then we had puppets be a huge yes puppets all of which you can see on the video of our on our website at Radiolab dot-org but what we're going to do for you now is play you part of that original show actually the first story in that show which is about the end of the dinosaurs because we have news to tell you about that story and it's verisimilitude yes so we're going to go first play you part one of our show about dinosaurs let's go back to the Paramount Theater in Seattle here we go okay we're going to start you off with a guy well the guy who started it off for us it's a guy named Jay Jay melosh professor at Purdue University and I study impact craters among other things not only can Jay melosh create impact craters with his mind but he and his colleagues have been investigating this moment almost as if it were a crime scene that happened not 60 million years ago but yesterday and the story that they've put together it's more than just

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interesting it's frankly

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it's frankly terrifying and weirdly specific as it happens take for example the seemingly simple question of when when did it happen you don't mean like the year that would be a little too specific no I don't know if you remember but Jay got even more specific than that this was a casual question that I threw out listen to his answer by the way do we know anything about seasons was this a warm particularly actually it was between well this is a bit of a stretch but it was sometime between June and July really and you can see that and so specifically how would you know that the reasoning is weakened for example this is the this is the first surprise kind of a controversial idea but basically goes like this Jay says scientists have found some pollen in rocks which date from that time two different kinds of pollen and based on an analysis of those two kinds of pollen we know that the impact took place between the flowering of the lotus and the flowering of the water lily okay so that's what Lotus you see flowering on the left it's a water lily flower

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on the right you can see this if you look at our video online fossils found at the impact site that had pollen from both of these flowers in the same Rock would suggest that the impact did in fact take place somewhere between June and July is one of those things in geology we get a glimpse of a moment far far back in time so let's go deeper into that moment all right everybody let's collectively rewind our minds back in time tens of millions of years into the past 66 million years ago to be precise

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there they are Majestic beasts hanging out on the plains eating their Lotus leaves

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sometime in June June 17th let's say

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and everything on this day pretty much normal this particular fateful day was no different than any of millions and millions of previous day's as far as the dinosaurs were concerned but if there were any astronomers at the time which there weren't they might have had some inkling that something was coming because had they looked up they would have seen a tiny little dot of light in the sky or as planets the moon move with respect to the Stars this would have had a constant bearing and the old Seaman could tell you that if you see something constant bearing that's on a collision course with you and that thing of course is our asteroid zeroing in on the earth I want to say that we do know quite a bit about this asteroid from the size of the crater and from the amount of certain minerals found at the impact site we know that the asteroid was roughly six miles wide

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and then again roughly six miles long which makes it approximately the size of Manhattan Island or or Mount Everest it's roughly the size of Mount Everest that is the Robertson a geologist who knows quite a bit about this asteroid and by the way it has a name that it's the asteroid called baptistina Baptist eema why that's Tina Baptist and I don't know how they they named asteroids on another subject we do know that the Earth's moon was probably produced by a collision with something the size of Mars whoa

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just do that in cause it's cool doesn't really relate to our story we don't have the whole evening here it's just a to it okay the dinosaurs are here on Earth are eating their leaves meanwhile up in space our asteroid Baptist Tina is now hurtling towards the Earth 20,000 miles an hour area fast 20 times faster than a very fast rifle moment and scientists couldn't be sure what would happen mathematically I mean when an amount Everest sighs bullet traveling at 20,000 miles an hour hits our atmosphere the atmosphere is really just a very very thin skin over the rest of the earth so scientists are right if we're going to construct this story let's just take a piece by piece and first figure out what would happen when this big ball hurtling through space slams into our atmosphere which is made of gas of course so just to approximate let's fire a bullet through some gas and watch what happens now here we basically showed a super slow motion video of a gun firing a bullet underwater you can see it on our website Radiolab dot-org it's very

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you'll see the bullet coming out and freeze it right there at the edge okay basically what you see is this bullet steaming through the water and by the way we use water as an approximation for gas because in gasps you would have the same effect I'm about to describe creating a wake behind it and the Wake gets wider and wider as it Trails away from the bullet and if you imagine this shape in three dimensions really what you're looking at is a kind of a cone like a funnel shape and inside the the that the walls of the funnel inside that cone is nothing

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nothing nothing because it because it's in water so you saying there's it's like a hole in the water that's what I'm saying there's nothing in there it's a vacuum in there because the bullet is shooting to the water pushes the water out of the way and for a beat the water doesn't have time to come back together and so all you have is emptiness in there right there this what you're seeing is a massive hole in the water created by a tiny little bullet now imagine that that bullet is six miles wide and the hole that it's making is right above your head what does that mean if you're a dinosaur looking up with what would happen well if you were in the right place and this is going to be the wrong place in a second or two you were in the right place to look behind the asteroid as it came in you'd probably be able to see clearly through the space

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what does that mean you would suddenly be looking at a nighttime hole in a daytime sky right well to be fair Jay did tell us that you would need special kinds of eyeballs to see this night hole and add a sky and the Dinos didn't have that so science still I mean just imagine what a last image that would be to see day and night come together in the same moment

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but according to Jay you better not blink because before you could open your eyes again

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the asteroid would have hit the surface and if you're in a position to see that then you're going to be engulfed by the violence that is just about to occur by the way the audience was just laughing at a dynasty los Muertos graphic that just came on the screens so we know was a big explosion fine that it was violent fine but I think we should be a little bit subtle about this because obviously if an asteroid is the size of Manhattan and it lands on your head you're not going to feel very good about that but if Manhattan is is hitting the planet Earth that's a little bit like a pebble hitting an enormous beach ball yeah and I can imagine that the little Pebble sized relativistic speaking the pebble would create some damage in the spot where it landed but let's suppose that you are a leaf eating mother of three hadrosaur living in New Zealand right and you're just at the moment that the asteroid comes in your on the your antipodal on the other side of the planet would you have any idea that this was happening as the

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question that we took to Jay how much damage with this thing actually do well we can do experiments

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we can produce things situations like this in small quantities in the Laboratories

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which brings us we're good to hear you did to this guy Peter Schultz and I like to do impact experiments Pete Schultz basically has every 13 year olds dream job it gets to blow shit up for a living basically what B does is he works at this place that you're seeing right here on the screen this is the NASA Ames laboratory in California and the thing that they're putting together there in the middle frame that is a giant three-story tall Cannon what beat does is he takes projectile so for example you're going to see him take a little glass bullet over there and he's going to load it into the top of the cannon and then he's going to fire it right into a stand up for planet Earth which for him will be a sandpit and lucky for us when we called Pete he was just about to pull the trigger on this thing so your we're calling you on a day in which you are trying to experience experience the day actually yeah but I think we're gonna survive that's our plan

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hold on we're going to we're going to assume the position we have to cross your fingers

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here we go

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rolling

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that is gorgeous that death oh my gosh I think it has that you'll get instant playback oh my gosh that is the sound of a man very happy with his explosion you can see every piece of this was happening so based on experiments like this people like Pete can figure out precisely what happened when the asteroid hit the earth they can quantify the explosions Power by basically leveraging up experiments like this so according to Doug the amount of energy that would have been Unleashed when that thing came rushing in on to Earth is roughly this I would hit the Earth with an explosion that's a hundred million megatons

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their lips date Sarah our guitarist kind of swinger guitar around had a metal moment though look at her wrong or she'll do that to you okay so here's essentially how Doug broke that down for us

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two tons of TNT we're talking tons you're not megatons to tons of TNT will essentially do this

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on one of the three screens you see a 10-story building imploding two tons of TNT will take down a building now fifteen thousand tons of TNT that is what the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 on a second screen we see archival footage of the atomic bomb that chaos is 15,000 tons of TNT now these days according to Doug Robertson a hydrogen bomb current hydrogen bombs are typically of the order of 1 million tons of TNT equivalent

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Now 1 million tons of TNT equivalent that's what we call a Megaton and if you remember Doug said that the asteroid impact was the equivalent of 100 million megatons really what he's saying and concrete terms is that that impact was the equivalent of 100 million of those bombs going off all at once in the same spot

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which is a lot

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that is true that is true however it mean it's a bit really depends on what you mean by a lot because I was doing a little Googling and I was surprised to learn that a hundred ten million megatons is not nearly enough to destroy the planet to destroy the entire planet you would need you ready for this a hundred and ten quadrillion megatons of TNT which is a hundred million times a hundred ten million megatons of TNT so going back to your hadrosaur situation mother of three in New Zealand if the thing came in antipodal to her maybe she would feel the ground shake a little bit but after a minute she be like whatever and should go back to eating leaves you probably wouldn't notice it well no no because that's not what we were taught in homeroom bye mrs. Magoo or whoever your teacher was here is the classic explanation there was an impact of course and kicked up an enormous amount of dust you remember this the dust then kind of covers the planet it blankets the earth makes the Earth very cold makes the Earth very nasty all the big plans die the little plants get sick the dinosaurs get hungry the dinosaurs get sick

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and then gradually you know they get dead dead author and editor and editor from different things 10,000 years thirty thousand years for to till you get like oh like nine hundred thousand years later we got a shivering last dinosaurs sitting there in the cold and that's the end that's the story we were told in school is a long slow wintry glass yeah no no why we tell these good people that tired old story from mrs. what is it mr. Magruder smack I made her McGruder tonight okay yeah let us offer up a completely different kaddish nights nice Scottish all right we'll go with that lets actually flip the understanding completely I think we should based on new science so all right here's we're going to do Keith pull up that ballistics video that we showed earlier with the red sand can you sort of pull that up and blow it up to the three screens and then yeah rewind it back if thank you it wouldn't it back just a bit more we'll be okay so this is a

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thousand frame a second video that you're seeing here this is from Pete's lab this point on the screen all you're seeing is a bit of red sand now what you see in the first few frames as you see the laser hitting right there red sand flying in the air super slo-mo and the next frame forward right there you see some fire see little bulb of fire erupted near the impact site right where the laser hits the sand there's this little clump of flame and we freeze on that spot now scientists can now measure the temperatures in that spot right there oh yeah right there and just to State the obvious we know from those measurements that that spot right there would have gotten very very very very very hot

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you're Way Beyond the temperature of the sun we were talking temperatures maybe 20,000 degrees Sons temperatures about 5,000 degrees and if we're talking temperatures four times hotter than the sun well anything that's that hot is going to instantly instantly turn to gas

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a very very high temperature high pressure gas it's actually Rock Vapor rocks team so imagine this thing comes barreling in this asteroid it doesn't Just Bounce Off the Earth it plows into the earth goes into the Surface 2 miles in five miles in seven miles in 10 miles in 20 miles into the Earth it goes all the rock that's its plowing into is turning into a liquid and then into a gas and now Watch What Happens Next this is a basic physics experiment we're going to show you on the screen you see a very lovely video actually of a hand dropping a metal ball into some sand it's just a dude dropping a ball in some sand watch this right here Paul goes in and like a millisecond after it makes impact disappears into the sand a little spear of sand go shooting back in the opposite direction sort of a bounce-back effect does this always happen this whatever this is it's like Newton's law of something yeah

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Newton's law of sand look see yeah but what you see is you see this fine plume of San Gil shooting back in the opposite direction as a sort of rebound right now imagine that that ball is an asteroid and that's and over there that's the planet Earth to Keith play that one more time we play the video again but this time as the ball drops it gradually morphs into an asteroid

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thank you for the cell so what you would get the same effect you would get that

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the simple point it's just something we do you wonder where we get all of our sound design is out of that man's mouth that's where so you would get that same bounce back effective a fine plumes shooting back in the opposite direction but we know from what we just heard Doug describe that it would not be wrong would not be sad in this case it would be rocking gasps this plume of hot gas expands upward and pushes it right on through the atmosphere up into space some fraction at the moon really some fraction of that hit Mars okay so now you got this sneeze of rock Vapor its out in space basic physics says that as a travels out of farther away from the earth what's going to happen is it's going to start to cool down a bit and when it cools it re condenses into little droplets of that basically formed glass very quickly and droplets of glass about the size of sand now if you look at one of these little droplets of glass under a microscope

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this is what it looks like right there on the screen you see what looks kind of like a translucent snowball that is actually a magnified image of one of these bits of glass that fell from space that day most of them didn't land on the ground I'll talk about that in a second there it is

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I don't know about you but I find that totally terrifying because that's it looks like a little Baptists Tina right tiny little asteroid except now imagine trillions of these things in a cloud and The Cloud of shrapnel going out out out away from the earth and what's going to happen next is that it's going to start to lose momentum that cloud when it does the Earth's gravity is going to grab back hold of it and say come on back and 90% of them come back to the Earth

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what does falling glass do harm yes because what happens is that the the glass out in space starts to spread out like north and south and east and west and eventually it will appear in the sky over New Zealand it's now a global phenomena and you know it's really hard to imagine what the hairdresser would have seen But the thing to keep in mind is that these things as they're coming in these bits of glass 90 some odd percent are burning up in the atmosphere so very few of them are hitting the ground so from her point of view probably would have looked like the greatest meteor shower anyone has ever seen

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with one significant bummer which is this when these little bits of glass come in each one that burns up is depositing a little bit of heat into the sky and collectively there's such a massive rain of these things coming in well the heat would build up the sky would turn red

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it would be getting hotter and hotter

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and at a certain point Jay wondered well how hot exactly would it have gotten like how much heat exactly would have built up there in the sky and then started to radiate down we calculated the amount of heat that would come down number ten kilowatts per square meter and yeah okay well we get this number well what does that mean well I went home and I hooked up a a current meter and pride to measure the amount of heat produced in my oven for different amounts of power and I could get about seven kilowatts per square meter in my oven on broil and like 500 Degrees broil yeah but that wasn't quite enough not nearly

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so Jay started measuring other kinds of ovens and finally found out that the heat would be in fact like being in a pizza oven a pizza oven is about right which means that if you were a terrestrial dinosaur anywhere above the ground on the earth on that day you would have experienced some heat that is almost unimaginable

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maybe it started at a hundred degrees because it was June was summer but within minutes it would have been 300 degrees

500 Degrees

700 degrees

900 Degrees

estimates are on that day temperatures topped out at something like 1200 degrees at that temperature nothing can protect you your scales your fur whatever you got it's not going to do any good your blood will literally start to boil inside your body and you will die

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it's essentially according to this Theory the dinosaurs and everything else on Earth that day would have been incinerated Doug thinks that's what the demand not so much the impact but all that objective went up into the sky came down his glass rain and created that heat that's what did the men

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he would argue it didn't just do some of the men or even many of them and he would say it did all of them in all at once there is zero evidence that any dinosaur made it through the crazy part of this theory is that Jay and Doug think that the whole process from the impact of the glass rain to the incineration of all of these species on the planet it would have taken a few hours

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his best guess he thinks maybe two hours

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I mean that's less time than a business lunch you try getting East Northwest anywhere on Mercer Street at rush hour in two hearts can do that mean if you think about it that is less time than you will spend in this theater tonight

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that means that you're saying that an animal that had been Supreme on the planet for 200 million years disappears in a few hours completely yes yep that's what the evidence suggests that's right

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well you can consider the evidence but also you could consider common sense I mean we've got a world filled with terrestrial dinosaurs they were on every continent there even in Antarctica and to say that they all disappeared in two hours I mean all that would that suggest that there's none of them in out of Harm's Way none of them in a cave somewhere none of them in a grotto none of them in a in a protected Forest of any kind the word all in that connection it's just too much I just don't buy it oh yeah I mean the truth is that the science is never going to be so exact as to say yeah all of them disappeared or it happened on a single day or on an afternoon I mean no no tool that we have is that precise but Jay is saying is that it happened fast very fast nothing made it through

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what I find interesting is that ultimately you don't need the ballistics or anything we've shown you so far to know that something major and sudden happened because you can see evidence of it literally etched into the Earth so

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here's the spot where we first found if you Bounder you can see it really well out in Colorado actually we sent one of our producers Molly Webster out there to meet a paleontologist named Kirk Johnson they hiked over a couple of Hills I found this one specific spot Mike ready for dinosaur to come around the corner and you minute they started to dig

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down like a foot at this point from where we were turns out for every 3 feet you down 10,000 years in time to see the Earth has layers kind of like a tree has ring and every three feet down you go you're going back in time about 10,000 years and when you go all the way down all the way back to 66 .09 million years you will find this one little skinny strip of Rock

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okay that's a kitty battery

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that

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this one skinny Gray Line this this gray crappy that this now in a very real way that line that you're seeing that represents the day the asteroid hit the day just above that line that's a little bit after the day just below that line because a little bit before today the line is called the KT boundary and what's cool is you can actually touch it you can touch evidence of that moment and in fact Kirk what he did that day was he took his finger and he dug a piece out and he handed it to Molly this we're holding I'm holding holding you're holding the KT boundary it's like it's almost like chunks of coal yeah but it's not what you're holding is it dark gray mudstone the carbon-rich mudstone and in that must own you'll find all kinds of things I mean you'll find very rare minerals like iridium that probably came in on the asteroid and got smushed into that line those little glass balls I was talking about there's a little hell balls well if you get out a microscope and you look at that rock you will

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them in there we put up a funny cartoon of the little hell balls they're all in that line how thick do you think that line is much about an inch is like hidden in there it's sort of a story of that day absolutely and here's the crazy thing if this is the line right here this little strip here Robert Chase is a picture of the KT boundary with his finger and then you dig just below the line you are going to find over and over again dinosaurs everywhere be not going to be alive of course he says putting some toy dinosaurs under the line and making them move but giving them a certain amount of energy which I shouldn't but they're fossils and you will find dinosaur fossils from Europe and Idaho and Montana this one says it was meeting China but maybe just go above the line you don't find any dinosaurs So Below the line scientists have looked everywhere above the line and they haven't really everywhere they have looked anyway they found nothing

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thing nothing it's a different world that's the amazing thing is it different world

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and as your pretty red God this is one world and that's another world

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you're literally just pointing pinky to point your finger spread

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this is another moment where I would urge you at some point not now keep listening but at some point watch the video of this performance because what Sarah Darren Glenn and Keith do in this moment visually it's pretty amazing

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okay so that was the story we told about the end of the dinosaurs live at the Paramount Theater in Seattle Washington when we come back we're gonna take a quick break right now but when we come back our reporter Molly Webster and I will dish about what we have just learned about that day those hours so long ago we have a whole and I'm not going to tell you this you don't just have to stay around it's coming up in just a minute this is Mike Bell from Newton North Carolina Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more information about Sloan at www.samsung.com I hate everybody at Walters here I'm a producer at Radiolab and I'm here because I need your help this summer I'm hosting a series of Stories on the show and I have a request for those of you who spend a lot of time

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kids parents aunts and uncles teachers we're looking for stories about what we're calling tiny moments of childhood Brilliance basically I want to hear about those times when a kid you know did something that just made you lean back and say whoa how did they do that maybe it was the moment that a kid you'd been reading to four months started reading back to you or maybe the kid was at piano lessons and you suddenly notice they were doing advanced math on the margin of their musical score or maybe the kid was in math class and you notice they're writing music in the margin of their geometry homework we're interested in those small specific moments where a kid does something super smart but it doesn't have anything to do with the test if you have a story please share it with us and go to Radiolab dot org slash Brilliance and record a short audio message for us again that's Radiolab dot org slash Brilliance thank you so much

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this is Dana Thompson from Muncie Indiana Radiolab is supported by luminary the only place where you can listen to Bill Simmons new podcasts the rewatchable is 1999 a spin-off of the rewatchable the rewatchable 1999 dissects the most iconic movies from 1999 and all-time great year in film listen to the rewatchable is 1999 along with other original shows only all luminary visit luminary dot link /r l for your first two months of luminaries premium content for free after that it's $7.99 per month cancel anytime terms apply hi I'm Robert krulwich Radiolab is supported by Capital One Capital One is building a better Bank when it feels nothing like a typical bank it's why they reimagined Banking and build something completely different Capital One cafes they offer checking accounts with no fees or minimums savings accounts with one of the best savings rates in America this is banking reimagined with you

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this is Radiolab I'm Chad I'm Robert we are back now you just heard are drastic in the moment version of the day the dinosaurs all died and now you're thinking of something different no no it was some guy who sort of an amateur and he was living he went to South we have an update maybe you should brain dump to me from our reporter Molly Webster who reported that story for us way back when and now she is here again with news very interesting news well so we're updating the apocalyptical episode right which was probably the last time I saw you six years ago and and the reason we're updating it is because this science article came out the basically if it proves to be true it could be one of the largest paleontological discoveries of the day the dinosaurs

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I'd day hmm it claims to tell the story of the first 15 minutes to three hours after the asteroid hit down in Mexico and basically what it is is a geologic formation that is kind of like that line that we saw in Colorado but like that line on steroids and it's in the southwest corner of North Dakota close to Sonny was not close to is not close to the Gulf of Mexico at all it's like 3,000 kilometers away and this particular site used to be I guess the assumption is 66 million years ago that it was kind of like a river bet like a river valley that was muddy and warm and it was near something called the Western interior Seaway so then what did they find there so one of the author's on this paper is this super famous paleontologists Ian Schmitt he said

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when he went to the site and he stood there he's like what I see in this place is a three-hour story of that day with all the victims and it feels like a movie is playing out before me so he can sort of turned into a scene by scene by scene Adventure in time yeah so the story that they lay out in the paper is that this area within like 15 minutes after the asteroid it was hit by waves from the Western interior sea and they brought with them saltwater fish and like seashells and things like into this fresh water area and then at the same time remember like we talked about those glass balls the fell from the sky yes so the story that this area tells is that there are actually kind of like three phases of those glass balls of various like size and proportions and some that went really

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really far into like space and came back and so they came back later than all the other ones and are more you know it's funny it's like all glass balls in the end really but but like if you're a paleontologist you're really geeking out right now over like the different types of glass balls that this site hold these glass balls are basically the spill of the giant crash yeah and some of them are actually made of particles from the actual impact site like in all of the previous sites they had found in the United States none of those glass balls were actually still glass they had decomposed into clay apparently glass will change into clay over time I did not know this but in this location they actually have Glass unaltered by the passage of time so it holds within it like the air and geochemistry of that of that day and that place and they found some that were actually I feel like this is such a Jurassic Park woman they found some that were trapped

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Amber hmm that haven't better totally unaltered and I was just like I really don't know anything except for that like Jurassic Park made me think that anything in Amber is really important and very old very old at like and Frozen and holds holds all of the memories of Mother Earth and just a backup for chicken the site itself back in the back in the on the day that this this asteroid hit the earth that was a tropical well populated place yeah so subtropical well populated so we don't have dinosaurs and it would have yeah so it would have dinosaurs it would have fish it seemed to be covered in trees insects lots of insects mammals through little looks like a mammals right yeah whatever our oldest mammal was yes so it was a really like Lush happening area and what they see in this site that they've uncovered today is what appears to be

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is death they've described fish that are stacked dead fish fossilized fish that are stacked like logs and it's freshwater fish and marine fish and they do describe it as like a mass grave there are fish fossils like wrapped around tree basis like like creatures and plants and stones and Pebbles and shellfish and everything saltwater freshwater everything will smoosh together feels like a tumble of life that was like thrown like almost like thrown together in a wash and like mixed up you know if you're a if you're an animal in that moment you're there and something happens in Mexico and you have no idea right but maybe about 15 minutes after that thing happens in Mexico that you have no idea about you might feel the Earth Rumble there's some shaking and then that rumbling that shaking comes with it a big wave from the sea and so you get this big fish that comes in and then

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what happens is that which comes in is you're already starting to get the glass balls from the heavens and so and what they see is you get this like wave of kind of what seems to be almost like raining glass balls and then that's like mixed in with the mud from like the title search and the layers of things that are dying and the fish like some of the details that stand out to me the most are the the fish are all generally pointed in the same direction and they're like stacked pretty tightly mouths open and their fins splayed but one of the things I think is super cool is that all that different stuff we talked about happening across the globe in our original show like I probably got really hot like you know that was Jay melosh was like it's really hot dog Robertson was talking about like the boiler a boiler effect and then we talked about that flash of blue light and we talked about things raining from the sky and we talked about

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June or July all that stuff a lot of that stuff was based on really smart models this seems to be a place that actually will provide evidence either for or against those models like charred tree trunks which I think made like Jay melosh really happy because he was like I did get really hot you know and then there are like the fish wrapped around trees and then there appears to be a dinosaur bone and possibly a dinosaur bone with skin still attached and Kirk Johnson said if that is if it really is a dinosaur bone and that site is connected to the asteroid impact like they think it is it would be the youngest dinosaur ever my last question is is there something we need to know about the man whose dig this is that would color our feelings about the the study's author the main authors this guy Robert De Palma he's in his late thirties he does not have a PhD he works a lot

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outside of normal Academia but Jay melosh who was in our first thing he is the editor on the on the article and then Walter Alvarez and Ian Smith are in the article are are co-authors and then this other guy like March Mark Richards who's like a really famous tsunami earthquake guy so he's got a collection of people around him and I think everyone else says like if the stuff that they say that they have is there it's amazing that I do think one of the things in the paper like is like people are like you are claiming to know a three-hour window 66 million years ago that is a very big claim right you're really going to have to produce a lot of evidence and I think that people think it could be there boy you convinced me if you got it look like a random all squished up together all at once and you got

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in that you can account for in different stages and that looks like you're right there at the Splat moment plus three I know and everything's dead and the forest is burned us like it's almost like it's exactly what we said I know I was like well I'm hooked it's just a it does leave you at the end of the day feeling a little bit nervous to be on this big safe Blue Dot recognizing that we are so vulnerable that life is really fragile when a pebble can murder you know what I think is the crazy part is if you were an animal standing in North Dakota you would have no idea what was happening there's like I like logic I like to be able to say oh there's a source and then a thing happened and to just be there in all of a sudden the Earth starts rattling like a bell around you and then a tidal wave comes in and then I'm dead I believe comes in when you're not even near the sea know like that to me

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is the most is the most stunning part is he's just salt on your mouth as you die thinking of where did that is what yeah it's just it's just like

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to just be standing there unawares and then a thing happens that really has nothing to do with you nothing that's the weird part to me

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thank you Molly sure

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Let's go Team us their lives

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I just want to give it a very special thanks to the people who shared the stage with us Sarah lip state from Novella Darren gray on the base in Glenn kotche on the drums they're both from the band on film or we were so lucky to share the stage with those guys along with video Maestro key scratch who was doing the live video from our brilliant Puppeteer Myron Goose oh my God that guy so good check out all of them at Radiolab dot org slash live you can see them doing what they do visually it's pretty it's pretty worth watching

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I'm Jedi boom Rod I remember crow witch thanks for listening

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hi this is Jason Stood Still in Seattle Washington Radiolab was created by Jad a perm rod and is produced by Sauron wheeler Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design Susie Lichtenberg as our executive producer our staff includes Simon Adler Deca breslar Rachel Cusick David gebel Bethel hop T Tracy hunt Nora Keller Matt kielty Robert krulwich any McEwan lot if Nasser Melissa O'Donnell Sarah khouri Aryan whack Pat Walters and Molly Webster with help from she maole IE Audrey Quinn and Neil Danisha and our fact Checker is Michelle Harris

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hi I'm Robert krulwich Radiolab is supported by Delta Delta flies to 300 cities around the world that's 300 cities where people miss someone in one of our other 299 cities where people think that they're the only ones who know about that one place 300 cities where people sing in the car or in the shower or both poorly Delta doesn't fly just