In August 2017, a bubbly Dutch pink-haired 28-year-old graduate student flew from Amsterdam to South Dakota, where empty fields rolled wide before her, towns of a hundred people and a single church. “You a celebrity or somethin’?” a man had said last time she was in the area, picking up a can of Monster at a truck stop. “Not to my knowledge,” she said. Melanie During had never been to New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, but she was already familiar with this particular landscape, dense with buried bone.

Also in town was a 70-year-old Dutch paleontologist named Jan Smit, a man she got to know the day she dissected an ostrich in his kitchen. With him was a stranger, a 35-year-old American graduate student. The three of them drove to what During casually calls “a triceratops mass grave,” at which point, to her surprise, Smit left.

For the next few days, it would be the two students and whatever the ground gave up. Her companion drove a 4Runner under the arc of a giant sky feathered with clouds, through panoramic prairie, fields of buffalo, mud buttes rising against the horizon. He pulled off a gravel road and right onto a ranch.

They got out of the truck. With each step, dry grass crunched under their feet and grasshoppers sprang in all directions. Through the knee-high thistle, it was hard to judge where each footfall would land. The grass stopped, and the earth dipped into a gnarled mass of rock and clay. The land was strange, full of odd textures, scaly in spots, darkly reptilian, and blanched out in others. He was proud of the place. While the site was not technically his property, it was spiritually his, shaped and carved and loved by him, and During was there with his permission. He called it Tanis, so everyone else did too.

Robert DePalma is solid and dark and affable and shares with During a certain kind of rough history, but he is, according to Smit, During’s foil. When During looks at a bone, she sees a chemical matrix waiting to be investigated. She sees an opportunity to extract information. When DePalma looks at a bone, he sees a narrative. He tells stories about the bones, some of them true.

“He is secretive,” says Smit. “Melanie cannot be more the opposite. She’s in all the social media. She makes herself known.” One way that she makes herself known is by posting pictures of herself cradling a model of a baby T. rex like a prehistoric Pietà (“sweet baby Jesus Rex,” she calls it on Instagram) or riding a giant reconstructed dinosaur like a cowboy atop a horse. “I have had a great deal of criticism directed at my work,” she once said, “which was actually criticism of my flamboyant personality, my big mouth.”

During would have only a handful of days at Tanis, but they were days unlike any she had seen before. On a normal dig, it is typical to find nothing of note for long stretches. “You pee in the bushes,” she says, “you get chased by snakes, you find no fossils.” Here, she would brush away clay and come upon a new texture and color — a precious fossil fish. The first sighting gave her goose bumps. Blowing on the fossil would have been too violent an approach; she might waft away the very thing she sought. She would begin to gently carve out sediment around the fossil, but there, astonishingly, would be another one. “A luxury problem,” she calls it, “stumbling on all these other fishes in the way.”

The exact location of the site remains secret, vulnerable as it is to poachers and rival paleontologists. Almost no one knew about the place in 2017, but a few years later there would be magazine features, multiple documentaries, conference presentations and journal papers. David Attenborough, science’s most beloved narrator, would tell his audience of a “truly extraordinary dig site” against a backdrop of an asteroid hurtling through space. “No one has ever found the fossil of a dinosaur that they know for certain died as a result of the impact,” Attenborough would say. “This place might hold evidence of one of the most dramatic events in all the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of our planet.” The New Yorker would publish a feature centering DePalma as a controversial young scientist with a major discovery.

During and DePalma both believed the fish at Tanis died in a violent flood less than an hour after an asteroid hit the Earth, killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. This is why they found fish pointing in both directions, their bodies broken and speared with debris; like a pool in an earthquake, the river rocked back and forth, throwing sea life upward to land wherever it might fall and be entombed in layers of mud. “A car crash frozen in place,” as During puts it, a freeze-frame from 66 million years back. They would both converge on the same mystery, tunneling toward greater precision: In what season had the asteroid struck?

DePalma had set up two tents for them off-site, close to town, where they would sleep and have downtime, though downtime is not something During has ever really appreciated (“I don’t sit down and watch things” is her take on TV). All day long, in temperatures inching toward 100, they crouched over the delicate petrified remains of sturgeon and paddlefish, trying to position their feet such that they could draw remnants from sediment without crushing something that had survived 66 million years intact. They smacked at biting flies. They dug through hot days and slept in tents that failed to keep out the rain.

“Personality-wise, and this is really not about personalities … I mean, I don’t want to make it about personalities,” DePalma told me years later, resisting further specificity. “Personality-wise, she wasn’t necessarily someone I would normally be friends with.”

“I don’t want to judge people for how they come across on a personal level,” During told me, declining to elaborate, “but there were moments where I thought, It would’ve been very helpful if I could have just had a word with someone else.”

None of what follows will make sense absent a single social fact: The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.

It would take years for the ten days During and DePalma spent together to spin into a scandal that consumed both of them. She would accuse him of research misconduct and fabricating data. He would accuse her of plagiarism and defamation. He would lose weight and have flashbacks to childhood bullies; stress would pose a risk to her first pregnancy. Disaster struck one day in the spring, they both decided in the end, and transformed everything that came after.

We don’t know how to read history in water; we know how to read it in bone. The West, in particular a 500-kilometer stretch of rock known as the Hell Creek Formation, is an ideal place to preserve fossils because it is given to collect sediment and it is dry. A bad place would be the tropics, where a dead animal is likely to be eaten before it can be buried. A bad place would be a mountain summit, where a skeleton would be swept off on the wind. A truly terrible place would be the waterlogged nation of the Netherlands, where amid all that peat and loam and sand only a single dinosaur species has been discovered and described. It is a strange place in which to be a paleontologist, but it is where Melanie During was born in 1989, in a land unsuited to fossilization to parents unsuited to parenting.

The little home in Langedijk was not one in which scientific insights seemed likely to develop. Melanie’s father was absent, and, according to her, “a twat.” Her mother was ADHD, autistic, and, by her own description, inadequate. “I was not fit to do the job alone,” she says, “and I was alone,” though she took pride in being a child with her four children, singing and painting and presenting them with great bags of clay they could, together, manifest into shape. Melanie’s ambition stood out to her family in North Holland. “She loves the spotlight,” says her sister, a trait perhaps more befitting the United States, the country that held all the treasure and the trouble to come.

The Dutch school system makes distinctions early, and 12-year-old Melanie was placed on the least intellectual of three tracks, headed not for university but for trade school. Did Melanie want to be a plumber or a hairdresser? No one in her family had been to university. The decision to place a student on such a path is made, sometimes, with the knowledge that not all parents are capable of helping with rigorous schoolwork. In Melanie’s telling, her mother forced the older sister out of the house, sent a younger sister to live with her father, and often disappeared herself, leaving 16-year-old Melanie alone to care for an autistic 6-year-old brother. She shoplifted soap and cheese and maxi pads. She stopped speaking for a time. She went into foster care.

After school, Melanie picked tulip bulbs, delivered newspapers, cut roses, waited tables. Social life was a struggle. “She had a feeling,” according to her mother, “that people didn’t like her.” When Melanie was about 15, her history teacher was concerned about the isolated, chubby girl who seemed to have surrendered the very idea of fitting in. “I was bullied, too,” the teacher told me. In front of the class, the teacher crumpled a piece of paper into a ball and flattened it back out. This, she said, is what happens when you bully someone and then apologize. The paper is never quite right again.

Melanie told the history teacher that she would like to go to university but doubted this would be possible. The history teacher devised a complicated plan of tests and classes. Melanie followed the plan and thrived. Having had to take care of herself for much of her childhood, find a bed, find dinner, she was too independent for her foster parents and successfully petitioned to be emancipated at the age of 17.

By 2017, During was a master’s student in earth sciences at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit working on her thesis. She was examining rocks from a Dutch quarry using a method called stable-isotope analysis. To her great disappointment, she could not find anything earth-shattering to share. “All I could say,” she recalls, “was it was very hot and it was very saline.”

Avoiding work, During attended a lecture by Jan Smit on the occasion of his receiving the Netherlands’ highest award for earth sciences. Smit was talking about his trip to an extraordinary new paleontological site in North Dakota. The site was called Tanis. It occurred to her that if one performed stable-isotope analysis on the bones of the fish at Tanis, one could discover something about the moment in which they had died. Maybe she could find something more to say than: It was hot and salty. She began composing an email to Smit on her phone, right there in her seat, during his talk.

Smit already knew of this teaching assistant. She was the one who had asked him whether he had a pot large enough in which to boil an ostrich after she had procured an ostrich carcass and decided to dissect it for fun. “Somebody who wants to do something like that,” says Smit, “that’s a girl I like, who’s not afraid to do the experiment, is not afraid to make her hands dirty.” Smit told DePalma he had a student familiar with stable-isotope analysis, a subject in which DePalma had no particular training, and DePalma said she could visit. During had lots of ideas and no money. All her travel-grant applications were denied. Smit lent her the money to go to North Dakota.

The knowledge that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs is knowledge recently acquired; most paleontologists working today did not grow up learning that a rock six miles wide slammed into Earth and ended T. rex. The “Alvarez Hypothesis” was published in 1980, shortly after scientists found a layer of iridium locked in rock the world over and surmised that it could only have come from space. It is called the Alvarez Hypothesis and not the Smit Hypothesis because Luis Alvarez and his son Walter got their paper out before Jan Smit. As Peter Brannen put it in his excellent The Ends of the World, “The Alvarezes published first and were immortalized. Jan Smit doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.” Smit does seem to have acquired a page since the publication of Brannen’s book; under the heading “Known For,” the page reads: ALVAREZ HYPOTHESIS.

This is not to say that the idea was readily accepted; it sounded ridiculous, bombastic, childlike in its sudden simplicity, and the Alvarezes spent the ’80s arguing against those who attributed the end of the Cretaceous to excitable Indian volcanoes. In order to support his theory about a space rock with the force of 4.5 billion atomic bombs killing off giant reptiles, Alvarez had to find a crater the size of Connecticut. He looked in Iowa. He looked in the ocean; he was pretty sure it was in the ocean. He could not find it. If you’re so sure a massive asteroid felled the dinosaurs, the volcanists asked, why can’t you find this giant gaping hole? How hard could that even be? Conferences were held and concluded, craterless.

In fact, the crater had already been found, in the Yucatán, by a gregarious, eccentric oil-seeking PEMEX geophysicist named Glen Penfield. Penfield noted anomalies in a magnetic field, charted it with paper and a pencil, found a circle the size of Connecticut, and surmised, before anyone else, that he had found the crater in question. He called Walter Alvarez, left a message, and got no response. (“A mediocre geologist,” Penfield calls him now.) He tried telling NASA and was rebuffed. He had been trying to share the news about it for a decade, but the attitude, according to Penfield, was “This kid doesn’t even have a doctorate” and it’s “not worth talking to some oil guy.” He spent a considerable amount of time, he told me, depressed that no one would hear him, not even a mediocre geologist whose reputation hinged on this very information. He named the crater Chicxulub specifically “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it after a decade of their dismissals.” Yucatán Crater would have been too easy for them.

It was before grass, before beans, before the 24-hour day. In film, this has been represented as a man gazing into the sky as a rock floats into his field of vision, but this is a confusion born of our inability to understand speed and scale. You would have not had a moment to turn toward the sky; as Brannen explains, the rock, six miles long, shot from the height of an airborne 747 to the ground in .3 seconds and continued onward toward the center of the Earth, 12 miles into crust. In its wake it left a vacuum that sucked in shattered and melted masses of this planet and shot them into space. The shock traveled through the oceans; tsunamis hundreds of feet tall rose skyward. Bits of earth, ejected into space, fell back through our atmosphere on fire, a rain of flame. The surface of the planet grew hot as an oven set to broil. T. rex, triceratops: These were not creatures designed to hide. A layer of iridium settled over the globe, to be buried by millions of years of sediment and discovered by Jan Smit 66 million years and a few weeks too late. In the same layer, known as the K-Pg........

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