Hi everyone. Neil Clark here. I haven't posted to the site for a long time, so I thought I would let you in on some of the research I have been undertaking. I have studied a number of footprints from a locality to the northwest of the Isle of Skye north of a town called Uig. These are interesting because they are mostly young dinosaur footprints, but there is an adult footprint also. Not only that, the footprints all indicate that the animals were all moving in the same direction. Depending on how fast it takes for the sand to dry out and be covered, it seems likely that they were all made at about the same time. This would mean that we have, for the first time, evidence that adult theropods (meat-eaters) looked after their young! I like to think that the adult dinosaurs were taking their kids for a walk, just like ducks do with their ducklings!
2 comments:
Hi Dr. Clark. What an interesting set of prints. Greybull students were wondering if there is a way to determine how many "young" theropods there might have been? Also, can particular individual tracks be identified for stride/speed studies?
Dear Mr Iditablogger, Hi! It is not easy to determine how many "young" theropods there are, but one way is to try and match up corresponding left and right footprints in a line. This indicates that there are at least seven individuals. In terms of how fast they were moving ... they were all moving at a pace that would be considered as walking (somewhere between 2-3 miles per hour). This is like walking from 6th Avenue to 1st Avenue in less than 10 minutes.
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