Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Throughout this topic, I've lauded the great advantages of dinosaur trace fossils
over bones for all of the insights they give us about dinosaur behavior. Other than
telling us about behavior, and especially how dinosaurs interacted with one anoth-
er and their environments, one of the best benefits of dinosaur trace fossils is their
overallgreatabundancecomparedtobones.Forthemanyreasonsexplainedbefore,
in Mesozoic rocks of most places in the world you are much more likely to find a
dinosaur trace fossil than a dinosaur bone.
Yet there are a few regions that have Mesozoic rocks of the right ages and en-
vironments for dinosaurs where dinosaur bones are more common than their trace
fossils. One such place is Victoria, Australia, where I accidentally began some re-
search projects in 2006. Up until then and there, I had only dabbled with dino-
saur trace fossils in the U.S., mostly through having seen many dinosaur tracks and
other trace fossils in the western U.S. As mentioned previously, I was also help-
ing several colleagues with the description of a burrow made by the Cretaceous
ornithopod
Oryctodromeus
. In terms of writing about dinosaur trace fossils, I had
done a chapter about them in two editions of a dinosaur textbook. Other than this,
I was largely ignorant of dinosaur trace fossils. Most of my training, research, and
teaching dealt with other traces, both modern and fossil, made by a wide variety
of animals, invertebrate and vertebrate. Dinosaur trace fossils, such as their tracks,
nests, gastroliths, toothmarks, and coprolites, were fascinating but did not occupy
my every waking thought.
Ironically, then, my interest in dinosaur trace fossils was kindled in an area of
the world where they are scarcer than dinosaur teeth, starting with the first day I
laid eyes on Cretaceous rocks of Victoria. Although I knew about Lark Quarry, the
so-called “dinosaur stampede” (or “dinosaur swim meet”) site far to the north in
Queensland, and a few other dinosaur tracksites in the northern and western parts
of Australia, I knew next to nothing about any dinosaur tracks in the southern part
of the continent. Later I found out this couldn't just be attributed to laziness or dis-
