World's Largest Dinosaur Footprints Discovered In Western Australia (theguardian.com) 74
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The largest known dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Western Australia, including 1.7 meter prints left by gigantic herbivores. Until now, the biggest known dinosaur footprint was a 106cm track discovered in the Mongolian desert and reported last year. At the new site, along the Kimberley shoreline in a remote region of Western Australia, paleontologists discovered a rich collection of dinosaur footprints in the sandstone rock, many of which are only visible at low tide. The prints, belonging to about 21 different types of dinosaur, are also thought to be the most diverse collection of prints in the world. Steve Salisbury, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Queensland told ABC News: "We've got several tracks up in that area that are about 1.7 meters long. So most people would be able to fit inside tracks that big, and they indicate animals that are probably around 5.3 to 5.5 meters at the hip, which is enormous." "It is extremely significant, forming the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half the continent and providing the only glimpse of Australia's dinosaur fauna during the first half of the early Cretaceous period," he said. The findings were reported in the Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The largest tracks belonged to sauropods, huge Diplodocus-like herbivores with long necks and tails. The scientists also discovered tracks from about four different types of ornithopod dinosaurs (two-legged herbivores) and six types of armored dinosaurs, including Stegosaurs, which had not previously been seen in Australia. At the time the prints were left, 130m years ago, the area was a large river delta and dinosaurs would have traversed wet sandy areas between surrounding forests.
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How 'bout a 'bloomin onion, govner?
FFS
1. 'blooming onion' is a menu item from a US restaurant chain serving American cuisine in which the items are typically and arbitrarily given Australian names. (although in this particular case the item does not have an Australianized named)
2. 'govner' is a bad rendition of an English (UK) word which does not have any traction in Oz.
Struth mate. Nothing you wrote has anything to do with straya and you definetly can't talk strine.
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It's easy to understand why one would feel the way you do, but I beg to differ. It has very real applications, especially today. Studying dinosaurs, their mass-extinction and in general, the era they lived in, gives us valuable data on our climate. If we understand what happened back then, we can prepare for the future. Climate research is extremely important and studying the dinosaur era is a crucial part of that research.
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Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
Re: Useless (Score:4)
One of the famous mathematicians of the 1800s was proud that his work had no practical applications. (Sorry, I don't remember which one.) Lots of mathematical work seems that way, yet his work and much else that seemed useless at the time is now essential for fields like cryptography.
Paleontology? Toy makers, movie makers, and vast hordes of children love dinosaurs. For some children, interest in dinosaurs leads to an interest in science generally.
Paleontology leads directly into study of evolution and helps damage mythologies such as religion. (Is that why you're so sensitive?) If you are so interested in preventing the waste of resources, do something to prevent colleges from teaching their students how to provoke riots.
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It is useless to study dinosaurs. They don't exist and haven't existed for tens of millions of years.
I see you're unfamiliar with birds.
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And turtles. Especially the teenage mutant ninja type.
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You could always watch dinosaurs [wikipedia.org] for yourself and see if you don't learn anything from them.
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Setting aside the pursuit of knowledge, dinosaur fossils have real world value that only an idiot would ignore. Individuals and institutions are interested in dinosaurs and are willing to pay a lot of money, sometimes even millions of dollars ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) to own and display them. Dinosaur fossils can be tourist attractions that generate revenue. There's also a large black-market for fossils illegally stolen from lands. If some "study" allows one to protect, document, and safely unea
How old are they? (Score:1)
This is Australia. Those prints could be fresh.
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No. They would have been killed off by something meaner and more poisonous.
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That's a good question. They have to make sure this isn't a print where a very large foot slid in mud (this may or may not be obvious to footprint specialists) and that it isn't the diseased or deformed foot of some 1-off, if very large, animal.
Looking at all the large sauropods so far, assuming from the drawings they have examples of how big their feet are, and thus are accurate, this could be freaking huge.
If you look at the biggest known dinosaurs [pinterest.com], in the first picture overlaying some, the largest two a
Amazing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps even more amazing, consider the catastrophic bad luck that befell the planet's dominant life form, and allowed our kind a window in which to proliferate.
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I always thought that. But, when I see videos of jaguars attacking caimans and mongooses and honeybadgers attacking cobras and mambas, I start to realise how adept mammals are at killing. I think we over identify with some of our most lethal cousins. Just because I'm a mammal and I'm not a killing machine doesn't mean a cheetah or wolf pack isn't totally bad ass. WAY more scary than a velociraptor - https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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The irony is that the homosapien's violent nature wouldn't necessarily be enough to beat down on neanderthals since they were bigger and smarter than us, and that it was our SOCIAL nature that allowed us to gang up on them. Irony being that despite it (social behavior) being quite possibly the reason we became the dominant (and I suppose only remaining) hominid, we still can't get along.
Not only that. They have better tools and were built better for running and long distance trekking than Neanderthals.
There is very little to suggest Homo Sapien killed off Neanderthals in direct confrontations. It was more a function of out-breeding them and out-competing them in harvesting resources. Barring a plague, over-predation or genocide, to go extinct, you do not need to get killed off or fail. You just need to succeed less often over millenia.
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There is also strong evidence that Neanderthals and Humans were on friendly terms [npr.org]. Another factor that might be worth considering: in the historical period, even when arm
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Re: Amazing! (Score:3)
Except, sauropod dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded, just like an ostrich, penguin, chicken, pigeon, owl, or hawk is now.
T-Rex was basically the biggest, most bad-ass ostrich the world has ever known(*). And make no mistake... an angry ostrich can fuck you up quite badly.
(*) In terms of genetic distance, T-Rex had more in common with a modern sparrow than it did with any modern reptile or amphibian.
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When you think you're having a bad day, imagine what daily life must've been like for our mammalian ancestors in this age of giant dinos.
I asked and Bernie said it was pretty nice. ;)
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Perhaps even more amazing, consider the catastrophic bad luck that befell the planet's dominant life form, and allowed our kind a window in which to proliferate.
There have been 5 major extinction events we know of, and at least 20 minor ones we know of, in the last 600 million years or so.
That is decidedly not "catastrophic bad luck." More like clockwork.
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When you think you're having a bad day, imagine what daily life must've been like for our mammalian ancestors in this age of giant dinos.
Perhaps even more amazing, consider the catastrophic bad luck that befell the planet's dominant life form, and allowed our kind a window in which to proliferate.
Well I'd say it'll be comparable to, let's say, all of the animal kingdoms.
Disney's Bambi is nice and all, but in reality the life of like 99.99999% of all species is a constant struggle for survival.
Except maybe for the sloth and the honey badger, honey badger doesn't give a fuck.
Why the unnecessary units change? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the sudden switch from meters to cm when 106cm is 1.06 Meters? Comparing 1.7 to 1.06 is much easier to process, instead of making us go through the double check in our mind that we got the units right.
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Why the sudden switch from meters to cm when 106cm is 1.06 Meters? Comparing 1.7 to 1.06 is much easier to process, instead of making us go through the double check in our mind that we got the units right.
Relax. It's not as if you're being asked to compare 0.211 rods with 0.085 furlongs.
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+1
I was going to post the same thing.. Although I guess we have to be happy they didn't mix metric and imperial as is apt to happen here.
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Because the author didn't want to screw up the conversion (dividing by 100 is hard...) and thus just used the exact number from the article they referenced.
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Because anyone who is proficient with the metric system will not have any problem with this conversion and not even notice it. This is the fun part about the metric system. Yards to feet is a clumsy factor of three. With metrics you just move the decimal a tad.
If this is becoming too difficulty for people I really do hope we go the way of the dinosaurs.
Incorrect headline (Score:1)
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The story can't be that these are newly discovered footprints. The aboriginals have known about them long enough that they are a part of their creation myths. Or is it just that white people know about them now?
Sweet. Where did they publish their findings?
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Maybe try reading the article?
This is a conspiracy theory in action ... (Score:2)