It took 17 paragraphs before it got past the “Cretaceous Extinction 101” recap.
Regarding the floating ceratopsian, that’s also based on evidence from the site. A ceratopsian bone was found near the highwater mark of the flood, but probably couldn’t have floated there unless it still had flesh around it. In fact, some skin was found attached to the bone.
Another tidbit is that feathers found at the site appear to match a dinosaur similar in size to Dakotaraptor previously found by DePalma in the area.
Stop digging. You’re no Roy Chapman Andrews. 
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It took 17 paragraphs before it got past the “Cretaceous Extinction 101” recap. Then the paragraphs about DePalma’s personal history. I skimmed the article so broadly that it took a second reading for me to notice that there were actually new details waaaay at the bottom. So yes, there turns out to be good stuff there, if you get past the fluff.
(And no, I wasn’t aware that Preston had a background in science and not just in writing pulp fiction–I’ve never touched any of his stuff.)
Yeah, my first dinosaur book was All About Dinosaurs by Andrews. I still have it.
I agree–I have bookshelves filled with paleontology books written for the general public, even ones that focus on human-interest fluff (one of the most beautifully put-together and illustrated being Unearthing the Dragon byMark Norell, which is as much if not more about living in China as it is about feathered dinosaurs–if you don’t have a copy, you are missing something.)
I don’t know what my first “real dinosaur book” was–possibly The Dinosaur Heresies?
The New Yorker hasn’t been doing nearly as much science as they did back when Jeremy Bernstein was a contributor (not counting climate change and ecology stories.) An extinction 101 recap is going to be valuable for most of its readers. Most articles in the New Yorker, including those by John McPhee, include personal history.
I’m waiting for my dead tree version of the New Yorker to read the story (it was in the Times this morning) but I’ve subscribed to it for about 40 years, so I know it pretty well. In a country where there are way too many creationist idiots, an accessible paleontology article is nothing to sneeze at. Not that the New Yorker base includes a lot of creationists.
Scotty the T-Rex has been on public display for a decade or two at the Dino centre at Eastend, Saskatchewan (Eastend is located in the western edge of the province, of course 
.)
What’s new is that they’ve accurately re-sized it, which is what enabled them to conclude that Scotty is the biggest T-Rex ever found. For instance, the Royal Sask Museum, just down the street from Chez Pipers, has the original reconstruction of the skull, compared to the much larger reconstruction they were able to get after more accurate sizing of the bone fragments.
Clan Piper actually went out to the dig back when Scotty had just been found and got a tour from the palaeontologists who were working on it. Fascinating to see some of Scotty’s bones still in situ, poking out of the ground in the trenches.
I misunderstood. I knew it was discovered a while back. Somehow I got the impression it was being shown to the public for the first time. But just the recalculation is significant, showing the T. Rex could be larger and heavier than previously known.
Yes, some of the articles (especially articles from Alberta) have been making it sound like Alberta paléontologistes have discovered the biggest T-Rex ever! Closer reading indicates that the Albertans were involved in the re-calculations of the size.
Here’s a link to the RSM, currently showing a picture of a teacher with the reconstructed skull. (It may change soon; I think they update their pictures fairly regularly. )
http://www.royalsaskmuseum.ca/rsm?asset=2386-ig-1819878260047599215_228219529
Sorry - that should have said “a model of the reconstructed skull”
Mine, too! He made the Gobi romantically scary.
I got All About Dinosaurs in the 3rd grade, and of course went to the Museum of Natural History to see the eggs. I loved his dinosaur books - my wife loved his books of exploration, so we were a perfect match.
I don’t have my original copy, but I have one I found at a library sale.
Another tidbit from the New Yorker article: DePalma things that the size of juvenile fish and the presence of certain seeds and pollen indicates the impact took place in the fall. In the Cretaceous it would have been hot year-round, but daylength changes would be about the same, and such changes would have been even more pronounced farther north. This may have been fortunate if some animals were beginning to enter dormancy or hibernation. Also, the maximum amount of seeds may have been around. Extinctions could have been even greater if the asteroid had hit during the spring or summer.
Another thing I found fascinating in that article is the report of DePalma’s speculation that the events recorded at the site “… did not span the first day of the impact: it probably recorded the first hour or so. This fact, if true, renders the site even more fabulous than previously thought. It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone.”
Yeah, the fact that tektites were found in the gills of some of the fish would seem to narrow the time frame down to the time when they were still falling.
Maybe I missed it, but why does this necessarily mean that the mammal was born in the Cretaceous? Couldn’t it have simply dug a hole down through the KT layer hundreds or thousands of years later?
He speculated “might” and “may.” Though in the lab you might could tell something about how settled the mud when it was dug (still soft or dried out) and the age of the infill.
To me, the most interesting thing in the New Yorker article is this photo–the tektite at the bottom (too big to be a “micro” tektite) has punched through a number of varves, distorting the edges, and left a conical crater at the surface (with the “surface” halfway down the specimen) that was infilled with light colored sediment. Below the tektite the sediment is compressed downwards in a lens shape, and the fact that the tektite is off-center of the area of damage may indicate the angle that it was traveling as it fell.
I read the related BBC article about the reconstruction of the impact of the asteroid itself.
It mentioned that the centre of the impact would have momentarily been raised up higher than Mt Everest, then collapsed.
Wow.
Follow-up question: how did they find the impact crater, which is off the coast of Yucatán?