Fossil trackways might present tyrannosaur tykes teaming up
Paleontologists know little about what large, bone-crushing tyrannosaurs had been like as infants. Hatchling fossils are uncommon and supply few hints about these foot-high carnivores’ conduct. However now miniature trackways, present in rock roughly 72 million years previous, provide proof that child tyrannosaurs traveled in pairs.
Paleontologists first discovered the trackways throughout a riverbank survey of southwestern Alberta’s St. Mary River Formation. The location is rife with tracks made by many dinosaur species—“a busy time on the seashore,” as Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology researcher Donald Henderson and his colleagues describe it in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Among the many fossil footprints are seven miniature dinosaur trackways suggestive of people shifting in pairs. “The type of the small tracks, in addition to the tempo lengths, is an efficient match to what may very well be produced by hatchling [tyrannosaurs] Albertosaurus or Gorgosaurus,” Henderson says, noting that the tracks’ pointed claw suggestions counsel a predator.
Present information about tyrannosaur conduct comes largely from fossilized bitten bones and some scarce tracks. Injured skulls present that tyrannosaurs fought by biting each other on the face, and trackways present in British Columbia point out that adults sometimes socialized together. “Tyrannosaurs weren’t simply chompy, killing macho machines,” says fossil observe professional Lisa Buckley, who was not concerned within the new research. The newfound tracks trace that hatchlings shaped teams after leaving the nest, much like some herbivorous dinosaurs—in addition to residing crocodiles and enormous floor birds.
Buckley says it’s potential the tracks got here from a distinct carnivore kind, however both means the invention provides to what’s identified of dinosaur lives. “Regardless of which theropod group was accountable,” she says, “the footprints on this paper are fascinating as a result of they present proof of group conduct.”
This text was initially printed with the title “Dino Buddies” in Scientific American 327, 6, 17 (December 2022)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1222-17
