Scientists say they have found fossils near the Colorado-New Mexico border that prove some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction that most researchers believe was caused by a meteor impact 65 million years ago. James Fassett, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, says he has found evidence that a sizable population of ceratopsians and sauropods, a class of giant, dim-witted leaf-eaters such as the brachiosaurus, hung on for another 500,000 years in the [San Juan] basin. “There might even have been some T. rexes, based on some teeth we found” [Los Angeles Times], he said.
The bones of hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, anklyosaurs, and several other species were found together in a sandstone formation that dates to the Paleocene epoch—the time period after the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, which is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs [National Geographic News]. To prove that the bones he found were indeed older than the extinction and eliminate the possibility that they had not simply been incorporated into newer rocks, Fassett points to his discovery of 34 bones from a single hadrosaur: If they had been washed away from their original location, they would almost certainly have been separated, not found together [Los Angeles Times].
