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One might expect a dig site in some far-off desert when thinking of a paleontological discovery. Nevertheless, new finds are often made in museum collections.
An artist’s impression of an ancient ecosystem. Image credit: Davide Bonadonna.
Upon viewing the collection of eastern North American dinosaur bones at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, Chase Brownstein, a researcher from the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, noticed peculiar marks on two bones from two-legged dinosaurs called theropods that had been recovered from sites in New Jersey.
One femur bore several small, slender scrapes. Another leg bone was marked with several pits, and large areas of the specimen were flaked.
In addition, the second leg bone also had many smaller marks and strains that appeared as ovular and circular shapes.
“At least three potential biological traces on the bone were identifiable,” said Brownstein, who in the past few years has been working on the fossil record of dinosaurs from eastern North America, particularly those from a period of time between about 100 and 66 million years ago called the Late Cretaceous.
“Those on the femur are similar to marks previously identified as shark feeding traces. The pits and flaked areas on the second bone may be indicative of the bites of ancient relatives of crocodiles, and the smaller oval and circular indentations and stains were perhaps made by invertebrates like barnacles.”
Pits possibly made by crocodile relatives on a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone from New Jersey. Image credit: Chase D. Brownstein.
In addition to being another rare case of ecological interaction documented in the fossil record, the discovery of the biological marks on the dinosaur bones are also important for what they can tell us of the types of animals living along the coast of eastern North America about 68 million years ago.
The marks apparently made by crocodile relatives could suggest the presence of a species currently unknown from body fossils, and the circular stains, if made by barnacles, would add to the handful of such marks known from the time of the non-avian dinosaurs.
The research was published June 11, 2018 in the journal PeerJ.
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Chase D. Brownstein. 2018. Trace fossils on dinosaur bones reveal ecosystem dynamics along the coast of eastern North America during the latest Cretaceous. PeerJ 6: e4973; doi: 10.7717/peerj.4973
