A new report published in Nature Communications believes that a famous Chinese dinosaur fossil site came about much in the same way as Pompeii: ancient ash volcanoes.
The report claims that the fossil site in Jehol, China, which has produced many well-preserved dinosaur fossils was the result of volcanoes that created deadly pyroclastic flows that entombed and carried the ancient animals during the Cretaceous period to where they have been found, reports National Geographic.
The authors believe that it perfectly explains how many fossils there have been found in ancient lake beds and still often have rare things like remnants of feathers.
Author Baoyu Jiang, of Nanjing University, said that pyroclastic flows "not only caused major casualties as they [do] today, but also transported some of the remains into nearby lakes and rapidly buried the remains."
Some of the evidence they claim explains their reports are ash sediments that are found all around the Jehol biota and on many of the fossils themselves.
University of Bristol paleontologist Mike Benton wrote to NBC News and noted that the new report is "quite a radical, new idea" and "quite a challenge" to the previously viewed idea that the dinosaurs ended up in the lakes carried from rivers.
Benton did note that it's "unlikely" that volcanoes actually transported dinosaurs. "At Pompeii, people were overwhelmed and killed, but not transported."
image: Wikimedia Commons
