Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
world—Montana, USA and Victoria, Australia—had been proposed as sites with
dinosaur burrows, with the hope that more would be added to this list in upcoming
years, as paleontologists now knew what to look for.
“Mythbusting” a Dinosaur Burrow
Manyscientistswelcomemediaattentionorotherformsofinteractingwiththepub-
lic, whether through lectures or writing popular-outreach pieces such as magazine
articles or blog entries. Yet a mantra I often preach to my students and try to put
into daily practice is that these attempts at public outreach and communication do
not necessarily make our science truer. As I mentioned previously, science does not
prove, it disproves. Hence, paleontologists who live up to this ideal by testing their
own results—treating their work to the same degree of scrutiny and skepticism as
they would their rivals' research—always impress me. It is an intellectual honesty
we all need to practice, such as in interpreting the indirect evidence represented by
dinosaur trace fossils.
Along those lines, Dave Varricchio assigned an undergraduate student of his,
Cary Woodruff, to do just that. Woodruff's job was to test whether the
Orycto-
dromeus
bones could have been buried while in the den (that was the original hy-
pothesis) or whether they were carried in from outside (that's the alternative hypo-
thesis). If they were moved from outside of the den, this would be a strike against
thesedinosaurshavinglivedanddiedthereandwouldhavecastdoubtontheirhav-
ingbeentheoriginalburrowinhabitants.Instead,theirdeadremainsmayhavebeen
tossed into a big hole, burrow or not, that just happened to be in the area when a
river overflowed back in the Cretaceous.
So in an experiment straight out of the popular TV show
Myth-busters
, Wood-
ruff joined PVC piping and set up scaffolding to make a half-sized version of the
burrow. He then made up mixtures of sand, mud, and water, and used rabbit bones
asaproxyforthedinosaurbones.Thirteentimesherantheexperiment,inwhichhe
filled a plastic bucket with sediment and poured it down the hole. Sometimes rabbit
bones were added to this sedimentary stew, but other times he placed the bones in-
