Would the French accept that Notre Dame’s artifacts be entrusted to another country for safekeeping? That her citizens be required to travel beyond their borders to view them? Of course not. So why would Macron and European museum directors assume that this would be acceptable to Africans?

a Congolese businessman who runs an art foundation in Angola, has urged African leaders to “put their foot in the door before it closes” — meaning that they should take advantage of the French president’s limited offer to temporarily return some of the artifacts to Africa in exchanges and loans. But it is clear that such tokenism is not enough.

Much of this history has already been deliberately destroyed by European states keen to obliterate evidence of their crimes. If what is left is be lost to natural or man-made calamity, it would make it much harder for Africans to reconstruct an accurate history of what actually happened to them.

if Europe cannot protect its own artifacts, how can it claim to be the protector of African works?

A report commissioned by Macron has recommended the return of the artifacts, but many museum directors are reluctant to comply, some hiding behind the specious argument that these objects would be safer and better preserved for posterity in the West.

much of the money coming from French business leaders and ordinary worshipers.

that had stood since the Middle Ages and had come to embody the soul of Paris and perhaps France itself.

Johnson, too, finds the lack of transparency, and the dramatic aspects of DePalma’s personality, unnerving.

“If it’s what it’s said to be,” Johnson said, “it’s a fabulous discovery.” But he declared himself “uneasy” until he could see DePalma’s paper.

DePalma listed some of the other discoveries he’s made at the site: several flooded ant nests, with drowned ants still inside and some chambers packed with microtektites; a possible wasp burrow; another mammal burrow, with multiple tunnels and galleries; shark teeth; the thigh bone of a large sea turtle; at least three new fish species; a gigantic ginkgo leaf and a plant that was a relative of the banana; more than a dozen new species of animals and plants; and several other burrow types.

DePalma seemed to make a noteworthy discovery about every half hour.

DePalma knew that a screwup with this site would probably end his career, and that his status in the field was so uncertain that he needed to fortify the find against potential criticism. He had already experienced harsh judgment when, in 2015, he published a paper on a new species of dinosaur called a Dakotaraptor, and mistakenly inserted a fossil turtle bone in the reconstruction. Although rebuilding a skeleton from thousands of bone fragments that have commingled with those of other species is not easy, DePalma was mortified by the attacks. “I never want to go through that again,” he told me.

He noted that every fish he’d found in the site had died with its mouth open, which may indicate that the fish had been gasping as they suffocated in the sediment-laden water.

The deposit consisted of dozens of thin layers of mud and sand. Lower down, it graded into a more turbulent band of sand and gravel, which contained the heavier fish fossils, bones, and bigger tektites. Below that layer was a hard surface of sandstone, the original Cretaceous bedrock of the site, much of which had been scoured smooth by the flood.

When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

DePalma told me. At the time, he told the Los Angeles Times, “A scavenger doesn’t come across a food source and realize all of a sudden that it’s alive.” Horner eventually conceded that T. rex may have hunted live prey. But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he didn’t remember him: “In the community, we don’t get to know students very well.”

They tried to get me to do that so I would get along with the other kids. But I was digging up the baseball field looking for bones.”

DePalma grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and as a child he was fascinated by bones and the stories they contained. His father, Robert, Sr., practices endodontic surgery in nearby Delray Beach; his great-uncle Anthony, who died in 2005, at the age of a hundred, was a renowned orthopedic surgeon who wrote several standard textbooks on the subject. (Anthony’s son, Robert’s cousin, is the film director Brian De Palma.)

Microtektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain microtektites by the million.

Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.

The eruptions, which began before the KT impact and continued after it, were among the biggest in Earth’s history, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and burying half a million square miles of the Earth’s surface a mile deep in lava. The three-metre gap below the KT layer, proponents argued, was evidence that the mass extinction was well under way by the time of the asteroid strike.

the discovery of an impact crater buried under thousands of feet of sediment in the Yucatán peninsula, of exactly the right age, and of the right size and geochemistry, to have caused a worldwide cataclysm.

was from the dusty remains of an asteroid impact.

Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils.

Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star.

but voters will benefit most from legions of reporters working without fear or favor. ♦

Her work provoked a public outcry, and the Administration reversed its policy.

As a result, the temptation in media businesses is to exploit political tribalism.

Facebook and Google

The mystery provoked fevered speculation, but Mueller’s office, unusually for Washington, did not leak, and so arrived the March Surprise.

President Trump, for his part, tweeted that the media had “pushed the Russian Collusion Delusion” while knowing that it was false, and reprised his incitements against journalists, saying, “They truly are the Enemy of the People.”

(When the paper contacted Trump, Jr., for comment, he released the e-mails in question.)