Sunday 27 April 2014

Albian sauropods and maybe even stegosaurs (2)

There are more seemingly three-toed, oval pes prints scattered around one of the dinoturbations near Pula. They can be noticed among the obvious sauropod tracks. An example is in the bottom photograph with my red outline speculative interpretation. Could it be the  stegosaur Deltapodus ichnogenus? I can't tell for sure. It could be a sauropod or an ankylosaur of the different morphotype from the ones I have found earlier or just the result of the different dynamics in the print making. This natural cast is just about 15 meters away from the one from my previous post (in the upper photograph). It's of the roughly the same size as well.
Here is my "fantasy" scene from Pula mudflats soon after a tempest (which has left a brecciated surface), some 100 million years ago. A lone, late surviving stegosaur is walking carefully along the slippery muddy shore. It looks like Wuerhosaurus. A pterosaur flies by. Soon, a herd of large sauropods will occupy the terrain, obliterating most of the previous tracks.




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