A rare looping trail of fossilized footprints in Colorado is giving scientists a detailed look at how a giant dinosaur moved 150 million years ago. The evidence also raises the possibility that the animal was walking with a limp.<\/p>\n
Located near Ouray, the trackway is one of the most continuous and tightly curved sauropod footprint trails ever recorded.<\/p>\n
Dr. Anthony Romilio of The University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab studied more than 130 footprints spread across the 95.5-meter track.<\/p>\n
“This was left in the Late Jurassic when long-necked dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Camarasaurus roamed North America,” Dr. Romilio said.<\/p>\n
“This trackway is unique because it is a complete loop.<\/p>\n
“While we may never know why this dinosaur curved back on itself, the trackway preserves an extremely rare chance to study how a giant sauropod handled a tight, looping turn before resuming its original direction of travel.”<\/p>\n
Drones Reveal the Full Dinosaur Trackway<\/p>\n
Because of the enormous size of the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite, examining the footprints entirely from ground level has been difficult.<\/p>\n
Co-author Dr. Paul Murphey from San Diego Natural History Museum said researchers needed a different way to document the site.<\/p>\n
“It has been challenging to document these footprints from the ground because of the size of the trackway,” Dr. Murphey said.<\/p>\n
“We used drones to capture the entire trackway in high resolution.<\/p>\n
“With these images we generated a detailed 3D model, which could then be digitally analyzed in the lab at millimeter-scale accuracy.”<\/p>\n
The resulting virtual reconstruction allowed the researchers to follow the sauropod’s movement across the entire trail.<\/p>\n
“It was clear from the start that this animal began walking toward the northeast, completed a full loop, and then finished facing the same direction again,” Dr. Romilio said.<\/p>\n
“Within that loop we found subtle, yet consistent, clues to its behavior.”<\/p>\n
Ancient Footprints Reveal Changes in Its Stride<\/p>\n
One of the strongest patterns involved the spacing between the dinosaur’s left and right footprints.<\/p>\n
“One of the clearest patterns was a variation in the width between left and right footprints, shifting from quite narrow to distinctly wide.<\/p>\n
“This shift from narrow to wide step placement shows that footprint width can change naturally as a dinosaur moves, meaning short trackway segments with seemingly consistent widths may give a misleading picture of its usual walking style.<\/p>\n
The researchers also found a small but persistent difference between the lengths of the dinosaur’s left and right steps.<\/p>\n
“We also detected a small but persistent difference in left and right step lengths, of about 10 centimeters or 4 inches.<\/p>\n
“Whether that reflects a limp or simply a preference for one side is hard to say.<\/p>\n
The findings suggest that long dinosaur trackways can preserve behavioral details that shorter stretches of footprints may fail to reveal.<\/p>\n
“There are many long dinosaur trackways around the world where this method could be applied to extract behavioral information that was previously inaccessible.”<\/p>\n
The investigation of the track site has been supported by the U.S. Forest Service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A rare looping trail of fossilized footprints in Colorado is giving scientists a detailed look at how a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[278370,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-565551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-behavioral-science-nature-insects-including-butterflies-extreme-survival-dinosaurs-ancient-civilizations-fossils-anthropology","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}