How do you make sense of footprints made by extinct animals millions of years ago?
In the case of dinosaurs, analogy with their living avian cousins provides information. For the bipedal theropod dinosaurs, the group that includes T. rex, emus appear to be the best candidates for study.
A fossil dinosaur trackway in northern Wyoming comprises thousand of tracks with a curious gait. Watching emus made sense of these tracks in which the dinosaurs appeared to have crossed one leg over the other.
Emus tend to look around, and this “scanning behavior” causes them to cross their legs when they walk. It is likely that the Jurassic dinosaurs did the same thing.
The Wyoming trackways suggest that the dinosaurs that made them traveled in groups, and may have cared for their young, as juvenile and adult tracks are found together.
Research by Brett Breithaupt, presented at Philadelphia meeting of the Geological Society of America
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