Dinosaurs Without Bones
Page 55
FIGURE 15. Borings in Late Jurassic dinosaur bones, attributed to bone-boring termites. Obviously, these trace fossils were made after the dinosaur was already dead. Specimen is about 15 cm (6 in) wide, and is on display at Dinosaur National Monument (Utah).
FIGURE 16. Toothmarks in an Apatosaurus ischium, which, based on their sizes and spacings, were probably made by the large theropod Allosaurus. Specimen is on display at Dinosaur Journey Museum (Museum of Western Colorado), Fruita, Colorado; scale in centimeters.
FIGURE 17. Right side of a Triceratops skull with wounds on its squamosal (left) and jugal (center) bones, a trace fossil of where another Triceratops collided with it. Sketch informed by figures and descriptions by Farke et al. (2009).
FIGURE 18. The Late Cretaceous hadrosaur Edmontosaurus (top), with a Triceratops skull for scale, and a close-up of its tail bones (bottom) with a healed bite mark. The latter is a trace fossil of a theropod attack that the hadrosaur escaped (lucky for it, unlucky for the theropod).
FIGURE 19. Possible dinosaur gastroliths, or just rocks? A dilemma posed by smooth, rounded, and polished stones in many Mesozoic sedimentary formations made while dinosaurs were alive. Specimens are on display at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah.
FIGURE 20. Gastroliths that were formerly in the abdominal cavity of an Early Cretaceous marine reptile, with a partial rib included. Specimen at Kronosaurus Korner in Richmond, Queensland, Australia.
Figure FIGURE 21. A mass of small gastroliths in the abdominal cavity of the Early Cretaceous theropod Caudipteryx from China. Specimen is a replica (cast) of the original and is on display in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
FIGURE 22. Modern carnivore feces (left) left as a territorial marker by a coyote (Canis latrans) on the middle of a well-used trail in Georgia, with the author happily pointing to it and approving of its presence; a cough pellet (right) filled with fiddler-crab parts, deposited by a laughing gull (Leucophaeus altricilla) on an intertidal sandflat, Georgia. Scale bar (lower photo) = 5 cm (2 in).
FIGURE 23. Brachiosaurus projectile vomiting and physics associated with such tracemaking activity (left), and hypothetical trace resulting from this behavior, with main impact crater, associated stream, and small-theropod victims (right).
FIGURE 24. Odd depression in a Late Jurassic limestone, Colorado (left), identified as a sauropod urination structure (urolite), and an undergraduate student providing scale while helpfully demonstrating its possible origin; artistic recreation of dinosaur urolite from the Early Cretaceous of Brazil (right), based on a photograph by Fernandes et al. (2004). Scale bar (right) = 10 cm (4 in).
FIGURE 25. Coprolites attributed to the Late Cretaceous hadrosaur Maiasaura of Montana and evidence that these were attracting some invertebrate admirers. Coprolite (top) containing dung-beetle burrows (located left center and upper right); coprolite (bottom) in the field with fossil snail in it (located near its center). Scale in upper photo in centimeters; specimen part of traveling display from Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana.
FIGURE 26. The clearest example of a dinosaur track—probably from a small ornithopod—from Victoria, Australia; when found in 1980, it was the only one from southern Australia. Specimen is in Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, and is about 10 cm (4 in) wide.
FIGURE 27. The most abundant concentration of dinosaur tracks discovered thus far in southern Australia, discovered at Milanesia Beach, Victoria. Sandstone block (top) hosting the tracks, which were interpreted as small theropod tracks. Map (bottom) of where the tracks are located on the rock surface; scale bar = 15 cm (6 in).
FIGURE 28. Close-up of one of the best-preserved theropod tracks in the first-discovered rock slab at Milanesia Beach (top), compared to the track of a sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) from Georgia (bottom). The tracks are about the same size, scale in upper photo in millimeters.
FIGURE 29. Modern and fossil comparisons between traces of theropod dinosaurs, avian and non-avian, respectively: trackway of a Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) on beach sand (left) at Mission Beach, Queensland, Australia; Early Jurassic theropod trackway (right) in sandstone, southern Utah. Scale on left = 20 cm (8 in) and on right = 15 cm (6 in).
FIGURE 30. Fossil bird tracks from the Early Cretaceous of Victoria, Australia (top) and the Eocene of Utah (bottom). The Cretaceous track is from the right foot of a heron-like bird that came in for a landing from flight on a sandy river floodplain; scale in centimeters. The Eocene tracks are from a web-footed bird similar to a duck or flamingo, made on a muddy lakeshore; scale = 10 cm (4 in).
FIGURE 31. Speculative trackway of the giant Marabou stork (Leptoptilos robustus) that decided to go “hobbit hunting,” turning to stalk a small human (Homo floresiensis). Both species shared the island of Flores (Indonesia) during the Pleistocene Epoch.
FIGUURE 32. Main forms of bird tracks, from left to right: anisodactyl, palmate, totipalmate, and zygodactyl; a typical bird walking-trackway pattern, made by a boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major) on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Scale bar in bottom photo = 10 cm (4 in).
FIGURE 33. Modern bird burrow, probably from a northern rough-winged swallow (Stelgidopteryx serripennis), which it dug into a soft Pleistocene sandstone on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Scale in both centimeters and inches.
FIGURE 34. Big sauropod tracks in Early Cretaceous sandstones, exposed at low tide near Broome, Western Australia. Spousal unit (Ruth Schowalter) for scale.
FIGURE 35. Nesting ground of Australasian gannets (Morus serrator) with regularly and densely spaced nest mounds on an elevated marine platform: Muriwai Beach (North Island), New Zealand.
FIGURE 36. Theropod track forms—avian and non-avian—that were likely seen by Charles Darwin in South America (Argentina) and Edward Hitchcock in North America (Massachusetts) at about the same time during the early 19th century. Track (top) of greater rhea (Rhea americana) in Patagonia, Argentina; scale in centimeters. Theropod dinosaur track (right) from the Connecticut River Valley similar to those described by Edward Hitchcock. Scale = 5 cm (2 in) in both photographs; photo of dinosaur track by Patrick Getty.
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Copyright © 2014 by Anthony J. Martin
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