For those with truly obscure fetishes for political history, I give you this photograph:
Posted on 10/21/2007 7:02:54 AM PDT by decimon
The first fossil tracks belonging to large, carnivorous dinosaurs have been discovered in Victoria, Australia, by paleontologists from Emory University, Monash University and the Museum of Victoria (both in Melbourne). The tracks are especially significant for showing that large dinosaurs were living in a polar environment during the Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole.
The find is being reported today, Friday, Oct. 19, at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Austin, Texas, by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory. Martin researched the find with Patricia Vickers-Rich and Lesley Kool of Monash University and Thomas Rich of the Museum of Victoria.
The three separate dinosaur tracks are about 14 inches long, show at least two or three partial toes, and were likely made by large carnivorous dinosaurs (theropods) on river floodplains about 115 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. Based on track sizes, Martin estimates that these dinosaurs were 4.6 to 4.9 feet tall at the hip, large by human standards but about 20 percent smaller than Allosaurus, a large theropod from the Jurassic Period.
Martin found two of the tracks during a February 2006 visit with Rich to the "Dinosaur Dreaming" site, near the coastal town of Inverloch. Tyler Lamb, a Monash undergraduate student and volunteer at the dig site, found a third track in February 2007, having been alerted by Kool to look for them. Martin then confirmed its identity during a visit in July 2007. Other possible, partial dinosaur tracks have been found at the same site and another locality, but these have yet to be studied in detail.
Vickers-Rich and Rich have been studying the dinosaurs and mammals of Victoria for nearly 30 years. Lower Cretaceous strata of Victoria have yielded a sizeable amount of dinosaur skeletal material since the late 1970s, resulting in the best-documented polar dinosaur assemblage in the world. Until Martin's find in 2006, however, only one dinosaur track (from a small herbivorous dinosaur) had been documented.
"I think a lot more tracks are out there, but they've been too subtle to notice before now," Martin says. He and the other researchers say they are optimistic that additional tracks will be found, now that they have examples of the tracks to go by in their searches.
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Emory University is one of the nation's leading private research universities and a member of the Association of American Universities. Known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities, Emory is ranked as one of the country's top 20 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.
Cool. Now that they have found the tracks, I guess it won't be long before one will be able to take the Carnivorous Dinosaur Train into Sydney for the opera.
Cretaceous carnivore ping.
Your joke is way funnier.
At the Steve Irwin Concert Hall.
groan.
If it’s all the same to you I’ll drive, in my Corvette Stingray...
Judging from the lack of photos, it ate the guy with the camera.
Terrible thing that global warming. Even the dinosaurs suffered from it. Then again we have our current dinosaur, Al, causing us to suffer.
Well it's not like I'm being paid for this. ;-)
Go with it! The crowd's with you.
dinosaur footprint posts need pix.
lol. When I read the headline I had this mental image of police roping off the carnivorous foot prints.
For those with truly obscure fetishes for political history, I give you this photograph:
I heard that did that to some dino tracks in a Hill Country river in Texas. It is private property and I guess the owners got tired of people coming down into their river to see them. There is a state park in north Texas where you can still see dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River.
Crikey!
Does this mean that these large carnivores were living in a frigid South Polar environment? What did they eat? Does it mean that they had to be warm blooded to survive in such an environment?
I don't think there were any frigid areas in that period. But then came Gorasaurus. Inexplicably, everywhere Gorasaurus went it became suddenly cold.
Oo the bloody ‘ell is that?
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