♪♪♪
A new discovery of a fossil trackway
is giving us a better understanding
of what dinosaurs were doing
170 million years ago
on the Isle of Skye.
The Isle of Skye is in
modern northwest Scotland
and is known today for
being cold and windy,
but back during the Jurassic period,
it was a warm, tropical environment
filled with beaches and shallow lagoons.
The prints were found at a
place called “Brothers Point”
and some of the prints
were already known,
but recent storms have
shifted some boulders,
making more of the tracks visible.
This is one reason why paleontologists
often revisit the same
location year after year - 
because erosion is constantly 
revealing new things.
Some of the tracks definitely belong to
carnivorous theropod dinosaurs, 
which we know thanks to their
characteristic three-toed feet.
Others can be tentatively
identified as ornithopods,
large herbivorous dinosaurs
that walked on two legs.
Most interesting are the tracks called
by the scientific name Deltapodus.
We are never completely sure whether
a trace fossil, like a footprint,
belonged to a specific animal
so they are usually
given their own name.
In this case, the track maker is
most likely a kind of stegosaur,
the group that includes
the famous Stegosaurus.
The trackway is important because
very little is known about
the period they come from,
the Middle Jurassic.
For various reasons,
rocks of this age are
very rare worldwide,
and this is unfortunate because many
of the major groups of dinosaurs were
diversifying and changing at this time.
These fossil footprints
show that stegosaurs
were among the kinds of dinosaurs
roaming Europe 170 million years ago,
something we didn’t know before.
It turns out, footprints are
one of our best windows into the
ecosystems of one of the most
important periods of dinosaur evolution.
That’s it for Fossil Friday;
have a great weekend.
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And for more information about COSI,
Columbus, Ohio's Center of
Science and Industry,
visit cosi.org.
