Down Under Dinosaur Burrow Discovery Provides Climate Change Clues

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Source: ScienceDaily (July 11, 2009)

— On the heels of his discovery in Montana of the first trace fossil of a dinosaur burrow, Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin has found evidence of more dinosaur burrows – this time on the other side of the world, in Victoria, Australia. The find, to be published this month in Cretaceous Research, suggests that burrowing behaviors were shared by dinosaurs of different species, in different hemispheres, and spanned millions of years during the Cretaceous Period, when some dinosaurs lived in polar environments.

"This research helps us to better understand long-term geologic change, and how organisms may have adapted as the Earth has undergone periods of global cooling and warming," says Martin, a senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory. Martin is also an honorary research associate at Monash University in Melbourne.

In 2006, in collaboration with colleagues from Montana State University and Japan, Martin identified the 95-million-year-old skeletal remains of a small adult dinosaur and two juveniles in a fossilized burrow in southwestern Montana. They later named the dinosaur species Oryctodromeus cubicularis, meaning "digging runner of the lair."

The researchers hypothesized that, besides caring for young in their dens, burrowing may have allowed some dinosaurs to survive extreme environments – throwing a wrench in some extinction theories.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090710205357.htm

Photo at the link.

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1. They didn't give up without a fight.

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