That year, Robert DePalma, then a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Kansas, and his colleagues reported finding at the site fossilized fish whose gills were riddled with small glass spheres called spherules. The Tanis site has drawn similar skepticism in the past, Science magazine reported in 2019. It's possible that the Thescelosaurus and other animals discovered at the North Dakota site died days or years before but were violently uncovered during the asteroid impact and then reburied along with debris from the planet-rocking event, Brusatte said. Brusatte told BBC News that he's skeptical of the idea that the Thescelosaurus perished on the exact day the dino-killing asteroid came whizzing through the sky and punched a huge hole, known as the Chicxulub crater, into the Yucatán Peninsula. "I don't think we've ever seen a mummy of a Thescelosaurus before," he told Live Science.īBC One also called in Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as an outside consultant on the project. From the BBC photos and videos, it appears that the dinosaur leg has been mummified. "It's a cool fossil, if it's what it looks like," Johnson said. Barrett examined the fossil on behalf of BBC One, which will soon premiere a documentary about Tanis, where the specimen was recovered. Based on his examination of the fossil, Barrett said the dinosaur's leg was likely ripped off very quickly, and the limb bears no signs of disease or having been picked apart by scavengers.
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