The Day the Dinosaurs Died Page #2

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what they've discovered.

'I've arranged to meet

palaeontologist Kenneth Lacovara,

'one of the most experienced -

'and luckiest - fossil

hunters in the world.

'He's going to show me where

the discovery was made,

'in what used to be the seabed.'

We're going back through time.

We are. Now, if you take

one more step, Alice,

you will be in the Cretaceous.

Excellent.

'As we descend into the quarry,

we arrive at layers of sediment

'that were deposited during

the Cretaceous period,

'when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.'

So, down here, we're in

the Cretaceous period.

Here, we're in the Paleogene

period, after the Cretaceous.

'The boundary between the two

periods marks the moment

'that the dinosaurs went

extinct, 66 million years ago.'

So, this is the boundary right here.

No-one in the world has found

an in-place dinosaur fossil

one centimetre above that line.

The team uncovered a dense layer of

fossils right at this boundary line.

It's potentially a unique discovery.

Dinosaurs.

No dinosaurs.

Gosh, that's extraordinary.

'The animals found here are

typical of the late Cretaceous.'

- That's a formidable-looking tooth.

- It is, isn't it? - Yeah.

What's that from?

This is from a mosasaur.

Mosasaur's a giant marine

reptile, an apex predator.

Think of a Komodo dragon

that's as long as a bus,

with paddles for limbs,

a two-meter jaw packed full of these teeth.

We find mosasaurs here below our

bone bed and in the bone bed.

We never find mosasaurs above the bone bed

because they go extinct

along with the dinosaurs.

Ken believes that the

mosasaurs he's found here

may be some of the last that ever lived...

and that they died as part

of the great extinction event.

To understand why,

we have to look at the other fossils

that Ken has found in the quarry.

- This is incredible, Ken!

- HE LAUGHS

Look at all those fossils.

- 25,000 of them.

- SHE GASPS

The way you've laid them out in this

grid, is this as you found them?

These are the places in which

we've found them, yep.

- 170 square metres of them.

- SHE GASPS

It's an astonishing amount of work.

All these fossils occur in a layer

that's no more than ten centimetres thick.

'For Ken, the first clue

that these animals all died

'in a single catastrophic event

'is that the skeletons are largely

intact with no teeth marks on them.'

They weren't transported,

they weren't scavenged,

they died suddenly and

they were buried quickly.

That tells us that this is a

moment in geological time

that's days, weeks, maybe months,

but this is not thousands of years,

this is not hundreds of thousands of years.

This is, essentially,

an instantaneous event.

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