Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
These were the only photos I took of the suspected burrow that day, as I really
did not want to call much attention to it and we had other work to do in our short
time there. All of us wandered about, looking down on bedding planes, glancing
aboveusontheoutcrops,andinbetweenatnearbysectionsofthestrata.Thisperus-
alwasmildlysuccessful,asduringourshorttimethereMikeandIfoundafewfaint
and incompletely expressed dinosaur tracks, including one that was likely from a
largetheropod.Thismeantthatitwouldbeworthcomingbacktolookformoreand
bettertracks.Ialsonotedmanyfossilinvertebrateburrowsthatwereabouttheright
sizes for ones made by insect larvae. These were valuable indicators of the original
environments there, such as river floodplains that formed from the run-off of spring
thaws following polar winters. Yet we saw no bones.
All told, we were at the site for only a little more than an hour before slogging
back up the hill to meet our two friends, who wondered how things had gone.
Amazingly, we still had enough time that afternoon to stop at nearby Dinosaur
Cove, a world-famous locality for polar dinosaur bones that many of these same
Australians accompanying me had quarried in the 1980s and 1990s. We departed
justasthesunsetoverDinosaurCove,alongandsatisfyingdayoffieldworkcom-
pleted.
Later,IstudiedthethreephotographsIhadtakenoftheoddstructureatKnow-
ledge Creek and could not get over the eerie sameness it held compared to what I
had seen in the Cretaceous rocks of Montana. Not knowing what else to do, I sent
a photo to Dave Varricchio for him to assess. As expected, he was non-committal
about what it meant, but it felt good to share this coincidence with someone else
in the know. Nevertheless, one thing was for sure: I had to go back to Knowledge
Creek.
So I returned the next year, in July 2007, only a few months after the publica-
tion of the paper on
Oryctodromeus
and its burrow. The day that paper came out, I
wrotetoPatVickers-RichandTomRichtofinallydisclosemysecretthattheyhada
possible dinosaur burrow there in the Cretaceous rocks of Victoria. Of course, they
