May 10, 2022
SWOSU Press Release
A two-part Nova TV special on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)—Dinosaur Apocalypse—will have work featured by Dr. Jeremy Klingler, assistant professor of biological sciences at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, and other team members.
The program will air this Wednesday, May 11, at 8 p.m. on PBS channels.
Klingler and his associates will discuss paleontological discoveries he and his colleagues have made at the Tanis site in North Dakota. The program aired earlier in England. Both programs are hosted by Sir David Attenborough.
Klingler said the extinction of the dinosaurs has always been a subject of tremendous interest both to the professional paleontological community and the lay public. Since the 1980s, the “Alvarez-Smit Hypothesis” has postulated that a massive meteorite slammed into the Earth about 66 million years ago, throwing an enormous amount of ash, dust and soot into the atmosphere that blocked out sunlight for over a year which led to a total ecological collapse. Overall, approximately 75% of all life went extinct including, most famously, of course, the dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
Many devastating events occurred in the first moments of the meteorite impact including a mega-tsunami, magnitude Mw 10-12 earthquake, a rainfall of molten glass ejecta, and a super-heated atmosphere.
For the first time, the new fossil site in North Dakota called Tanis captures the events of the early hours of the extinction event in extraordinary and vivid detail. Klingler and his associates have been excavating the site for nearly a decade. Numerous exciting fossils have been found at Tanis which tell an incredible story of what happened on that fateful day of the impact.
Copyright 2022 Paragon Communications. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.
