Dinosaurs without bones: Dinosaur lives revealed by their trace fossils. Anthony Martins’

Dinosaurs without bones: Dinosaur lives revealed by their trace fossils.Anthony Martins’ fascinating book reminds us that behind the impressive skeletons that wow all the kids (and many of us adults it must be confesses) in natural history museums around the globe were very real lives involving the meanderings of very real creatures in search of the usual suspects such as food, reproduction and comfort. Part paleontological biography and part exposition of his lifetimes study of animal tracks, both in the wild of today and as trace fossils revealing snapshots of long gone moments in deep time. We already covered a famous example some time ago, that of a horseshoe crab that wandered into an anoxic zone and died with the final footsteps ending in the unfortunate’s fossilised corpse at http://bit.ly/2qAEabU.While the rest of his work sneaks in a look now and again, the main focus is on what we can learn about dinosaurs and how they lived their lives on the basis of their fossil traces. Now the first thing we think of is footprints, and the examples of stalking predators trailing moving herds, but occasional examples such as the marks where a dinosaur sat have also been identified. As well as giving a basic idea on how to distinguish the 3 main types, he also points out that many of the ‘prints’ we find are the underlayer rather than the now eroded original land surface. He also discusses large sauropod prints in which smaller therepods drowned found in China (see http://bit.ly/2sA2CbA).Further chapters discuss a variety of things… a whole chapter on nests set in several field locations is followed by one in which burrows are discussed (until quite recently there had been none recognised, until a spectacular example containing parent and 2 young turned up, providing proof that this whole ecological mode seen in modern animals was also available to dinosaurs). Other topics include teethmarks in bones as evidence of hunting or eating behaviour along with gastroliths, rocks swallowed to grind food in the gizzards of dinos and birds.There follows a somewhat gruesome discussion of the usual topics to amuse kids, vomit, coprolites (see (see http://bit.ly/2q7zla1) and how they can reveal the shape of dino recta along with recently recognised urination marks in palaeosols (see http://bit.ly/2qAEabU). He continues with a discussion of tracking modern birds and a final chapter on how dinosaurs en masse might have influenced the development of modern landscapes during their hundred plus million year peregrination across the surface of our green and blue globe.I picked the book up on a whim, thinking the subject matter might be somewhat dull but it was worth giving it a go, and was pleasantly surprised to be enthralled and turning pages swiftly. Unlike the skeletons in museums, which reflect either the moment of death, or more often a bunch of bones scattered by ancient rivers and scavengers (which is the more usual lot of the dino bone digger, National Geographic docos notwithstanding), trace fossils record real instants in actual lives, preserved my geological miracles as records that we can read to this day.The photo shows part of a Cretaceous bedding plane with over 325 prints made by at least 37 individuals, recorded in flat quartz rich sandstone deposited near the shore of the great inner sea that graced what are now parts of the Western US.LozImage credit: James St John -- source link

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