BBC story here.
Scientists have found creatures that were killed on the day of the impact and were immediately covered by mud and thus preserved as fossils.
Amazing.
Excellent and comprehensive article in the New Yorker.
Amazing, indeed. Although I understand there’s some controversy around it if only because the site is restricted and other researchers have not yet been able to independently verify the work. But to have, in effect, a detailed dated snapshot of the most significant single moment in the history of life on earth is beyond amazing.
Awesome find. Very exciting.
This is a good summary without all the long-winded “human interest” fluff from the New Yorker article. And the Gizmodo article isn’t particularly well-written, but it does have an image of tektites in a fish fossil not shown in the other articles.
I read the first article this morning and immediately felt this could be the most significant scientific discovery in my lifetime.
Absolutely fascinating.
That is fascinating, well done New Yorker
On the other end of the scale, regarding evolutionary expansion rather than extinction, there were some very exciting discoveries in China recently showing hosts of new creatures during the cambrian explosion preserved in wonderful detail.
It even has cartoons!
Both are incredible discoveries. And the largest known T. Rex skeleton was revealed recently as well.
Not to digress, but that is an absurdly asinine statement even if I generously assume that you know nothing about the New Yorker and its journalistic standing and didn’t read past the first three sentences. And wrongness of this magnitude deserves a response.
To be clear, I don’t go to the New Yorker for the scientific rigor I would expect in a scholarly journal, but that’s not what most people are looking for here. Those who do can feel free to read the PNAS article when it comes out. What I go to the New Yorker for is accurate, in-depth and balanced reporting. The author of that article is both a writer and an award-winning journalist who had corresponded with DePalma for some years before this discovery and was the first outsider to have access to the Hell Creek site. The extensive New Yorker article provides far more detail and background than either of the two things you cited; the Science Daily piece was copied from a Berkeley press release that reads like it was written by a high school junior for a creative writing contest, and the Gizmodo article is just laughably superficial.
But beyond all that, a particularly salient question here is how it came to be that the principal investigator of such a groundbreaking discovery – if indeed that’s what it turns out to be – is just a graduate student who has not yet earned his doctorate and who many might regard as unqualified. The New Yorker piece helps inform our objective understanding of how these events came to pass and helps us judge, as best as anyone can right now, how to balance the natural excitement of discovery with appropriate skepticism. Which is ultimately what science is all about.
I had to smile at the field clothes of De Palma and his assistant in the lead photo. They look like they just stepped out of the Bone Wars. I thought of Barnum Brown and Roy Chapman Andrews. (The latter, of course, was one of the models for Indiana Jones.) But old-timey clothes continue to be practical in that environment. (I just wonder how many rattlers are about to make knee high boots necessary.)
It might be useful for somebody who knows nothing about paleontology, but otherwise you are having to slog through a lot of 101-level material before you get to the actual new information. It would be like an article on the 737 Max spending several thousand words talking about the childhood of Orville and Wilbur Wright and the history of semiconductors before mentioning the software problem that the story was about. The article I linked cut straight to the chase for people who don’t need to be reminded of the basics.
BTW, his dinosaur book sounds like absolute garbage.
I would characterize the New Yorker piece as “in depth” rather than “fluff.” The Science Daily article isn’t really all that more technical than the New Yorker one. It does just give the basics; however the New Yorker article give far more depth and detail even on the science, not just on the personal aspects of the story. You might want to read the Science Daily one first to get the gist; but if you are seriously interested in the topic you’ll want to read the New Yorker one too. I know a great deal about paleontology and I found it very interesting.
No, it wouldn’t. It would be more like an article on the 737 Max describing the competitive challenges that aircraft manufacturers face today, then describing some aeronautical basics like stabilizer trim and the pertinent factors that make jet engines more efficient, and finally how these economic and technical factors came together to drive some of the bad engineering decisions that Boeing made. Because that’s the real story here, and that kind of in-depth analysis is part of what makes the New Yorker what it is. I can imagine you reading an article like that and declaring that there was too much “fluff” before they “got to the point”. No, journalists call that “background”, and it’s an essential part of the complete story. The New Yorker doesn’t do “fluff”.
You seem to be flailing now, and throwing around irrelevancies. We’re not concerned with his fiction writing. In any case, being “absolute garbage” seems at odds with it getting 4½ out of 5 stars on Amazon! 
The New Yorker piece is a great resource for this story, pending the availability of the PNAS paper on Monday for those interested. Meanwhile, I’ll do my part to keep this on track by not responding to any more hihacks.
I was wondering what you were talking about until I realized you meant the author of the New Yorker piece rather than DePalma. I fail to see what relevance a science-fiction novel about a dinosaur find has to the accuracy of a non-fiction piece.
The hijack that you started? What I did was link two relevant articles (one of which I had already posted here deep in a separate thread close to 7 hours before this thread was started.)
I just wonder why DePalma chose to contact a writer of Dan Brown-style books of conspiracy drivel rather than one of many real science writers.
See my post just before this–it would be like getting popular hack Michael Crichton to come to his site and write about it–why not a professional paleontologist that is also an accomplished writer? (Peter Douglas Ward would have been at the top of my list *) *Because he wrote a book about the government covering up the discovery of a dinosaur fossil covered with deadly “Venus particles”, possibly created by aliens to kill off the dinosaurs to pave the way for humans?
That would have been fine if you hadn’t included the silliness about the *New Yorker * piece being a piece of fluff, followed up with the pretentiousness of saying it was “101 material” and only for people who “didn’t know anything about paleontology.” You should probably stop digging now.
You evidently don’t know a lot about Preston. From Wiki:
I’ve read Dinosaurs in the Attic and liked it. He has quite a few other non-fiction titles. As a professional science writer myself, I thought the New Yorker article was excellent.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the picture at the start of the BBC article?
I think it’s the bubbles that really make it.
Some of the particularly fascinating finds mentioned in the New Yorker article but not in Science Daily or Gizmodo, are mammal burrows, at least one of which had the bones of the digger still inside it. Even more astonishing, the burrow seems to have been dug through the KT boundary layer. That is, the mammal survived the disaster, then dug down through the layers of rubble afterward. It was born in the Cretaceous and died in the Paleogene.
After all, Andrews was a great popularizer and wrote the first “real” dino book I read. Nothing wrong with writing for the general public.