What are the key takeaways from this TED Radio Hour episode?

Key insights include: **Asteroid Impact Timeline:** The extinction sequence unfolded in precise stages: a magnitude 10.3 earthquake struck 8.5 minutes post-impact, global temperatures reached between toaster-oven and pizza-oven levels within one hour, hurricane-force hot winds arrived 3 hours later, and a 42-meter tsunami crashed the coastline 12–18 hours after impact, sweeping dinosaur carcasses into marine sediment.; **Fossil Site Formula:** LaCovara's four-step method for locating scientifically significant fossils: find rocks of the correct geological age, confirm they are sedimentary, locate naturally exposed rock layers, then position yourself as far from other paleontologists as possible. Remote, under-explored Badlands terrain with moderate erosion rates offers the highest probability of new-to-science discoveries.; **Dreadnoughtus Scale:** The sauropod Dreadnoughtus schrani, discovered in Patagonia after five field seasons, measured 85 feet snout-to-tail, stood 2.5 stories at the shoulder, and weighed 65 tons — equivalent to 8–9 T. Rex. A single exposed tea-saucer-sized bone fragment led to the recovery of 145 associated bones from the same individual.

What did Ken LaCovara discuss on TED Radio Hour?

Paleontologist Ken LaCovara guides TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi through the Edelman Fossil Park in Mantua Township, New Jersey, where a former fertilizer quarry preserves the world's most complete death assemblage from the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Key topics include: **Asteroid Impact Timeline:** The extinction sequence unfolded in precise stages: a magnitude 10.3 earthquake struck 8.5 minutes post-impact, global temperatures reached between toaster-oven and pizza-oven levels within one hour, hurricane-force hot winds arrived 3 hours later, and a 42-meter tsunami crashed the coastline 12–18 hours after impact, sweeping dinosaur carcasses into marine sediment.; **Fossil Site Formula:** LaCovara's four-step method for locating scientifically significant fossils: find rocks of the correct geological age, confirm they are sedimentary, locate naturally exposed rock layers, then position yourself as far from other paleontologists as possible. Remote, under-explored Badlands terrain with moderate erosion rates offers the highest probability of new-to-science discoveries..

How long is this episode of TED Radio Hour?

This episode is 50 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

TED Radio Hour

The day the dinosaurs died

August 28, 2026

50 min episode · 2 min read

Ken LaCovara

Episode

50 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Health & Wellness, Psychology & Behavior, Science & Discovery

AI-Generated Summary

Published Aug 28, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Asteroid Impact Timeline: The extinction sequence unfolded in precise stages: a magnitude 10.3 earthquake struck 8.5 minutes post-impact, global temperatures reached between toaster-oven and pizza-oven levels within one hour, hurricane-force hot winds arrived 3 hours later, and a 42-meter tsunami crashed the coastline 12–18 hours after impact, sweeping dinosaur carcasses into marine sediment.
✓Fossil Site Formula: LaCovara's four-step method for locating scientifically significant fossils: find rocks of the correct geological age, confirm they are sedimentary, locate naturally exposed rock layers, then position yourself as far from other paleontologists as possible. Remote, under-explored Badlands terrain with moderate erosion rates offers the highest probability of new-to-science discoveries.
✓Dreadnoughtus Scale: The sauropod Dreadnoughtus schrani, discovered in Patagonia after five field seasons, measured 85 feet snout-to-tail, stood 2.5 stories at the shoulder, and weighed 65 tons — equivalent to 8–9 T. Rex. A single exposed tea-saucer-sized bone fragment led to the recovery of 145 associated bones from the same individual.
✓Deep Time Perspective: Placing extinction events on a 1,000-page Earth history book, the dinosaur extinction falls on the final page. On a calendar-year scale, dinosaurs went extinct December 26. All five previous mass extinctions resulted from climate crises, and LaCovara frames current human-driven biodiversity loss as a sixth extinction — one, unlike the asteroid, that is both foreseeable and preventable.
✓Public Fossil Access: The Edelman Fossil Park separates its 15-centimeter-thick extinction research layer from an adjacent post-Cretaceous layer open to public excavation. Every visitor who digs in that upper layer finds and keeps a 66-million-year-old fossil. When 2,000 public spots opened, they filled within 14 minutes, with 9,000 people on the waitlist — demonstrating scalable public engagement with active paleontology sites.

What It Covers

Paleontologist Ken LaCovara guides TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi through the Edelman Fossil Park in Mantua Township, New Jersey, where a former fertilizer quarry preserves the world's most complete death assemblage from the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Key Questions Answered

•Asteroid Impact Timeline: The extinction sequence unfolded in precise stages: a magnitude 10.3 earthquake struck 8.5 minutes post-impact, global temperatures reached between toaster-oven and pizza-oven levels within one hour, hurricane-force hot winds arrived 3 hours later, and a 42-meter tsunami crashed the coastline 12–18 hours after impact, sweeping dinosaur carcasses into marine sediment.
•Fossil Site Formula: LaCovara's four-step method for locating scientifically significant fossils: find rocks of the correct geological age, confirm they are sedimentary, locate naturally exposed rock layers, then position yourself as far from other paleontologists as possible. Remote, under-explored Badlands terrain with moderate erosion rates offers the highest probability of new-to-science discoveries.
•Dreadnoughtus Scale: The sauropod Dreadnoughtus schrani, discovered in Patagonia after five field seasons, measured 85 feet snout-to-tail, stood 2.5 stories at the shoulder, and weighed 65 tons — equivalent to 8–9 T. Rex. A single exposed tea-saucer-sized bone fragment led to the recovery of 145 associated bones from the same individual.
•Deep Time Perspective: Placing extinction events on a 1,000-page Earth history book, the dinosaur extinction falls on the final page. On a calendar-year scale, dinosaurs went extinct December 26. All five previous mass extinctions resulted from climate crises, and LaCovara frames current human-driven biodiversity loss as a sixth extinction — one, unlike the asteroid, that is both foreseeable and preventable.
•Public Fossil Access: The Edelman Fossil Park separates its 15-centimeter-thick extinction research layer from an adjacent post-Cretaceous layer open to public excavation. Every visitor who digs in that upper layer finds and keeps a 66-million-year-old fossil. When 2,000 public spots opened, they filled within 14 minutes, with 9,000 people on the waitlist — demonstrating scalable public engagement with active paleontology sites.

Notable Moment

When LaCovara's son found an unusually large, symmetrical fossil fragment during the visit, the paleontologist paused his confident identification, pocketed the specimen, and acknowledged it could potentially be dinosaur bone rather than sponge — a rare moment of live scientific uncertainty from a world-renowned expert.

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Episode Transcript

This message comes from Middlesex County, New Jersey. Here's why companies are actually making the move to Middlesex County, New Jersey. It's ranked in the top 2% of US counties for talent and knowledge creation and is more innovative than 98% of the nation. The opportunity is real, and it's right here. Visit biz.discovermiddlesex.com to set up a meeting with a business adviser today. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Two, three, four, five. Today on the show, the day the dinosaurs die. The directions are. In 2024, I got a sneak peek at an unusual place in Southern New Jersey that opened to the public last year. Oh, here's the lows. Because down Route 55, just a few minutes off Exit 53 B, if you take a quick right onto a road that tucks behind a Lowe's hardware and a Chick fil A fast food restaurant Woah. There it is. Oh, it's beautiful. There looms a massive modern wooden building set at the edge of a large pit of dirt. Humongous pit in front of it. But this isn't just dirt. This pit is actually a dry quarry full of fossils. Wait, Ken. Hi there. So nice to meet you. The paleontologist in charge of this operation and my tour guide is Ken LaCovara. And we are at the Edelman Fossil Park And Museum in Mantua Township, New Jersey. As we walked from the parking lot to the museum and the pit, Ken explained that paleontologists have been collecting fossils in Southern New Jersey for over a century. In 1858, the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton is found and dug up 11 miles from here in Haddonfield, New Jersey. But in 2003, when Ken first visited this site just south of Haddonfield, he wasn't that impressed. Honestly, I didn't think much of the site at the time. Ken was a professor in Philadelphia. Between lectures, he was bopping around the world to sites in Egypt Egypt. The Gobi Desert, Montana, Wyoming. And I looked at this site and I thought, oh, what a muddy hellhole. This was just a close place where I could, take our students so they could get a little experience digging fossils. You know, I'm embarrassed to say that I just didn't think much about doing research in New Jersey, and I was very wrong about that. Ken had no idea that this muddy hellhole, it had hundreds of …

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