Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
quentlyburiedandfossilized.Thiswouldhavebeenquiteageologicalcoincidence,
but it still had to be considered as a possibility. Regardless, Dave was right about
one thing: it was a cool specimen.
My reply to him the same day was understandably animated, and I wrote my
responses in between his quoted text to approximate a call-and-response dialogue.
Following his quotation “It's a dinosaur, a hypsilophodont,” I said:
[Colloquial expression—censored here—denoting excitement and enthu-
siasm, containing several profane words, and comparing the discovery to
the application of a foot to one's posterior.]
What I meant, of course, was that is a most interesting observation.
Congratulations on a noteworthy find, perhaps warranting further invest-
igation.
[Repetition of colloquial expression—also censored here—denoting
excitement and enthusiasm, containing several profane words, and com-
paring the discovery to the application of a foot to one's posterior.]
Discoveries are only the beginning, though. It was time for us to do a lot more
science.
I Have No Shovel, and I Must Dig
Only in the past fifteen years or so have paleontologists realized that a few dino-
saurs dug into the ground underneath them. As we learned previously, scratch-dig-
ging sauropods were one such example, in which titanosaurs used their specially
adapted feet to gouge the earth before laying their eggs.
Troodon
was another, and
it might have used both its hands and feet to excavate and shape its rimmed nests.
Afewotherdinosaurshadanatomical attributes that couldhavehelped them todig,
such as the small Late Cretaceous theropod
Mononykus
of Mongolia, which had
weird shortened and pointy forearms that looked like pickaxes. These appendages
havebeeninferredastoolsforbreakingintotermiteorantnests,gougingthesenests
