Posted on 05/21/2008 5:19:38 PM PDT by decimon
ATHENS, Ohio - Scientists say they have found dinosaur tracks on the Arabian Peninsula, a discovery they say may shed more light on where dinosaurs lived, their migration patterns and how they evolved they way they did.
The discovery of tracks of a large ornithopod dinosaur and a herd of 11 sauropods walking along a coastal mudflat in Yemen was reported in Wednesday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map," said Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in The Netherlands.
Only a few dinosaur fossils have been reported on the peninsula, including isolated bones from Oman and possible fragments of a long-necked dinosaur from Yemen, Schulp said.
Schulp conducted the study with Ohio University paleontologist Nancy Stevens and Mohammed Al-Wosabi of Sana'a University in Yemen.
Preserved in rocks at the site are the footprints of 11 small and large sauropods — long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — traveling together at the same speed.
A Yemeni journalist spotted one of the trackways in 2003. Stevens, Al-Wosabi and Schulp identified it as the footprint of an ornithopod, a large, common plant-eater that walked on its hind legs.
"It's an exciting find largely because it comes from a part of the world that is poorly known in terms of its vertebrate Mesozoic record," said Peter Makovicky, associate curator of dinosaurs at The Field Museum in Chicago. "This is part of the world with little body fossil record."
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On the Net:
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0002243/
Wahhabasaurus ping.
....I’m surprised angry jihadists haven’t destroyed them...
Well follow ‘em and catch one.
Must’ve been a lot of them there to make all that crude ;)
“This is part of the world with little body fossil record.”
Well Duh, it’s always under a burqua.
Well, that’s probably funnier than the cartoon. ;-)
Helen Thomas visited home?
Well duh! How else did all those dead dinosours get made into oil! (I am trying to be funny for you non-humorous types out there.)
Great article. Thanks!
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Thanks decimon. |
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Did they find any of McCain’s DNA near the tracks?
Predictably backwards area.
Everyone else has had Fossil watches and Fossil CDs for eons, but they're stuck with vinyl.
Worse! They found a petrified embryo, and it had a combination of McCain’s & Helen Thomas’s DNA.
I do hope the Wahabbasaurus becomes extinct soon.
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