Brachychirotherium Aetosaur Tracks paleontology

>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=ebsh0km9mAc

Give me five! 🙌🏻 • Did you know tracks have genus and species names, too? • Called an ichnogenus, ichno is track in Greek, it helps #paleontologists talk about tracks in a more codified fashion. • Think about your tracks. On the beach. In mud and concrete. Desert dirt. Ice. How different all of those look. I went on a track counting exercise one day and my same foot generated easily a half dozen distinct prints. Running, trotting, skipping, hopping, shuffling. All of those generate a different look and could be given a different name. And I thought we had it bad dealing with 1800s paucitypes! :-) • This track, #Brachychirotherium, means “short hand beast,” and is found across the Mid-Triassic through Early Jurassic of the Southwest. This beauty is from St. George, Utah, at the incomparable St. George Dinosaur Resource Site at Johnson Farm. • It has five relatively short toes on the hand and foot. Despite the name “therium,” which I always associate with mammals, it was likely made by a sweet #aetosaur. I included an image of what one looks like. That is #Desmatosuchus, one of the armored and herbivorous #aetosaurs so prevalent in these parts. Their osteoderms are ubiquitous and are one of the best ways to tell them apart. Even here, however, care must be employed, as armor over the shoulder can look different than tail and side pieces. Paleo is tough! • This genus is used for tracks in South Africa, Peru, Bolivia, across Europe and the United States. The continents were closer together, ancestral taxa dispersed everywhere, resulting in tracks of closely related animals going global. • Some argue this kind of track was made by a quadrupedal #rauisuchid, as aetosaurs aren’t known in all areas where these tracks are found. However, migrating animals can leave tracks in places they aren’t found. The debate continues! • Tracks are demonstrators of behavior, aside from teeth embedded in bone, it is about as definitive of a behavior as can be found. We have running, walking, swimming, predation, anoxic death, the list is vast and growing! This locality alone has a #Dilophosaurus rising, which definitively demonstrated how theropod dinosaur hands were held. • #FossilCrates

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