Traces of running, swimming and tail dragging: dinosaur 'track' found in Bolivia
Scientists have described a unique place in Bolivia where tens of thousands of footprints of dinosaurs that walked, ran and even swam along an ancient seashore have been preserved.
The study was carried out by Raul Esperante from Geoscience Research Institute (California, USA) together with colleagues, the work was published in the journal PLOS One.
It is about the Carreras-Pampas trail field in the Torotoro National Park. Bolivia has long been known for its wealth of dinosaur footprint sites, but many of them have not yet been described in detail in the scientific literature.
16,000 theropod footprints on a Cretaceous seashore
At nine sites, scientists have documented more than 16,000 footprints left by three-toed theropods at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
Features of the find:
footprints range in size from very small (<10 cm) to large (>30 cm);
different types of behaviour have been recorded:
walking and running,
swimming,
tail dragging,
sharp turns;
many tracks are orientated approximately along the axis north-west - south-east;
wave ripples (from water) are clearly visible on the surface, which confirms that the dinosaurs travelled along the ancient coastline.
Researchers note that Carreras-Pampas set world records for several things at once:
the number of individual dinosaur footprints,
the number of continuous tracks,
the number of tail drag marks,
the number of footprints left by swimming.
This abundance of tracks suggests that at the end of the Cretaceous period this was a very busy area where dinosaurs moved en masse along the coast. The parallel orientation of some of the footprints may indicate group movement of animals.
According to the authors, much of the footprints in the field have yet to be studied - both in Carreras Pampas itself and at other sites in Bolivia.
"It's an astounding window into the past: it shows not only how many dinosaurs passed through the area, but also what they were doing," one of the researchers is quoted as saying. - It's amazing to work at a site like this - everywhere you look, the ground is covered in dinosaur footprints".