Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in a while in this large collection would a shell show holes arranged in a row,
looking for all the world like it had been produced by a row of biting teeth
arranged along a linear jaw.
A month after my visit to the Tytell Museum, the issue of mosasaur bite
marks in ammonite shells was center stage at a large meeting celebrating the
Age of Dinosaurs. The meeting, named Dinofest 2, was held in Tempe, Ari-
zona. It was the second in a now-biannual event exhibiting and discussing
dinosaurs. The dinofests last a month and include a gymnasium-sized public
display of many fine dinosaur skeletons and other fossils. A thtee-day scien-
tific symposium held at the end of the Tempe dinofest was attended by the
brightest lights in the dinosaur hunters' firmament: the A list, headed by
Jack Horner and Bob Bakker, and the B list, which was virtually everybody
else still living who ever studied dinosaurs or their wotlds. I was included in
the latter category, not because I study dinosaurs, but because I study how
they died. Naturally, being a specialist on why everyone's beloved beasts are
no longer on earth makes one less than popular. No wonder they scheduled
my presentation at the end of the last session. Nevertheless, I was happy to
have been invited at all, and I attended many of the excellent talks. One I
especially wanted to catch was Erie Kauffman's; its subject was an update on
how mosasaurs consumed ammonites in those ancient Cretaceous oceans.
The talks wete held in a large room packed with professionals and the
general public. Erie strode to the podium at the appointed time and began
speaking. Erie showed, on the basis of his decades of bite analyses (neatly 40
years had passed since his original paper with Kesling), how mosasaurs would
stealthily creep up on the ammonites and then (depending on the particular
species attacking or being attacked), dive down, or swoop from behind, or
pirouette in some mad dive-bomber attack, whooshing through the watet,
snatching their prey unawares, giving them a "crack" and darned if they
weren't suddenly calamari. In fact, Erie estimated that at least a hundred
specimens had been shown to carry undoubted mosasaur tooth marks. Erie
delivered a breathtaking performance, and the rest of the audience clearly
felt the same way. It was great: diving mosasaurs, dead ammonites, predation
