The Great Cretaceous Walk Takes a Rest

About six weeks ago, I shared the happy news of our discovering dinosaur tracks at Milanesia Beach, Victoria, which turned out to be the largest collection of polar dinosaur tracks known in the Southern Hemisphere. Those tracks were found during the month-long excursion (May-June 2010) along the Victoria coast that inspired the start of this blog. And although we found heaps more trace fossils, the tracks constituted out most important scientific find. So even though we have a but more science to do, this is as good of a time as any with this blog to say, “Catch you later” and make a transition both geographical and temporal.

The Great Cretaceous Walk has been very, very good to me. But it’s time to take a pause in all of the walking and talking about the Cretaceous of Australia, and look closer to home (Georgia) and at this time in the present (otherwise known as “now”). Photo by Tom Rich, and taken on May 28, 2011 (Day 2) of our month-long field survey of the Cretaceous trace fossils of Victoria.

Cruising the Cretaceous of Queensland: Student Edition

Earlier this month – July 4-8, 2011 – was my third time to see the wondrous Cretaceous fossils of Queensland, Australia. But it was my first with university students in tow to share in that paleontologically inspired excitement. Our trip together to outback Queensland was during the third week of a five-week program for Emory University students taking a study-abroad program in Australia, taught by me and my good friend (and oh yeah, colleague) Steve Henderson from Oxford College of Emory. We did this trip to give them a taste of what life was like in the modern-day outback and 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, when theropod dinosaurs like Australovenator wintonensis (“Banjo”) likely chowed down on hapless ornithopod dinosaurs, and the whopping pliosaur Kronosaurus queenlandicus was ruling the inland seaway that covered much of the area we saw during our trip.

Paleontological innocents abroad, about to get acquainted with the past lives of outback Queensland. And who could resist posing with a life-sized recreation of the large ornithopod dinosaur Muttaburrasaurus langdoni, located in Hughenden, Queensland? Well, OK, I told them their grades depended on it, so they quickly got into the spirit of things.

Keeping Track of Fossil Tracks

The fossil thieves drove their sport ute into the Western Australia outback in the middle of the night, confident that no one would see them. Just to make sure, though, they turned off their headlights the last kilometer before their destination, using moonlight to keep their tires on the unsealed road. Once at the site, they used torches (flashlights) to search the ground, and quickly found what they were seeking. They pulled out a portable rock saw from of the back of the vehicle and cut through the 120-million-year old sandstone, the abrasive sound masked by nearby waves crashing during high tide. The sandstone bed was thick, but split evenly along its bedding plane so the thieves were able to use a lever bar to pry up each square. These blocks were heaved onto the truck bed; blankets were used to cushion them below and cover them above. The perpetrators got into the truck and sped away from the site, well before the first rays of the morning sun revealed the newly made and oddly square holes in the rock. They had just taken some of the few stegosaur tracks known from the geologic record, and they had stolen these from aboriginal tribal land. It was both a crime against the state and a grave insult to the people who regarded these tracks as part of their heritage.

Nice dinosaur track you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. Track is from a large theropod dinosaur, preserved in Early Cretaceous sandstone of Western Australia. Please don’t take it, legally or otherwise.

Dreaming of Dinosaur Dreaming

Humans like to celebrate anniversaries during their lifetimes in fives and tens, which I like to think is a direct reflection of a much longer evolutionary heritage. For instance, why fives and tens, and not, say, threes or sevens? Look at your hands and feet, count your fingers and toes, and see what totals you get for each appendage (yakuza excluded). These numbers are a result of our having descended from synapsids (“mammal-like reptiles”) that likewise had five digits on each end of four limbs. In fact, all mammals are synapsids, and the last common ancestor synapsids shared with dinosaurs and other egg-laying reptiles was more than 300 million years ago. Humans and most other mammals don’t lay eggs (albeit, some placental mammals like to hatch from eggs), but a few still do – monotremes, such as platypuses and echindnas – thus demonstrating a lingering trait of this reptilian ancestry.

So it was this week that I was reminded of a five-year anniversary, the evolutionary history of mammals, and our long-lost connection to dinosaurs, thoughts that all coincided as they were triggered by remembering the Dinosaur Dreaming dig site in Victoria, Australia.

No, these people are not incarcerated and carrying out their sentences by cracking rocks all day in the summer sun. They actually are: volunteers at the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig site in coastal Victoria, Australia; looking for fossils of Cretaceous dinosaurs, mammals, turtles, and other animals; and very much enjoy doing this. Really.