21st Century Dinosaur 3.0

Maintaining The Earth in the 21st Century

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This activity involves having students collect speed and footprint data on subjects while they are running and walking. The footprint data are analyzed and the speed estimates are compared to the actual measured speeds. Students then collect trackway measurements from published illustrations of dinosaur trackways to estimate dinosaur speeds. Students calculate the percent error for their experimental estimates and use this to interpret the results obtained from dinosaur trackways. Spreadsheets may be used to record and carry out the calculations in the analysis.

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Students are asked to discuss the significance of their results to ongoing debates over the physical capabilities of dinosaurs. Lab calculations and question responses are graded.

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This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Activities collection and has been reviewed by 1 other review process. The five categories included in the peer review process are Scientific Accuracy Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments Pedagogic Effectiveness Robustness usability and dependability of all components Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page For more information about the peer review process itself, please see http: This page first made public: Summary This activity demonstrates how measurements taken from fossil trackways can be used to estimate the speed at which extinct animals were moving when they made the trackways, providing students the opportunity to collect and analyze quantitative data.

Undergraduate elective natural science course "Dinosaurs and the Mesozoic World".

Undergraduate elective upper level geology course on Paleontology. Biomechanical analysis of speeds of extinct organisms from trackway fossils. As one of the most famous events in geological history, you might expect scientists would long have resolved the answer to this simple question.

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If asked, most people would probably tell you that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteorite. But the widely held view, that an extra-terrestrial rocky behemoth slammed into the Earth in Mexico and immediately wiped out almost all life, is vastly oversimplified. In reality it was a lot more complicated than that. My PhD research focuses on understanding past changes in climate, particularly during the Late Quaternary, which saw the demise of many large animals, such as mammoths and woolly rhinos. One of the largest extinctions in history was the famous end-Cretaceous K-Pg mass extinction that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

A new paper published in Nature Communications 1 reveals that Antarctic waters experienced two discrete warming events that coincided with two well-documented pulses of extinction around the K-Pg boundary. The authors suggest that this warming, caused by climate change, is the link between two proposed extinction mechanisms: It brings more evidence to the table that both events combined to change the climate on a massive scale.

Although in , an international collaboration of geologists weighed up all the evidence and agreed that the meteorite impact was the cause of the K-Pg mass extinction event 2 , there is still debate over the issue. It all comes down to timing.

In deep geological time, such as the K-Pg boundary, it can be tricky to assess the timing of events, as there are limited dating methods available. Dating for these deep geological events is on a completely different scale than the resolution I am used to working with, studying events in the Quaternary.

Measuring Dinosaur Speed from Trackways

When you are talking about 66 million years ago, there is no statistical way of separating time scales of a few hundred thousand years. This becomes a big problem when you have major events occurring around the same time in the geological record, as is seen at the K-Pg boundary. Within just a few hundred thousand years, the Earth was hit by the famous Chicxulub meteorite, as well as experiencing repeated volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Traps province of India. Public domain image by NASA.

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The group discussed the mechanisms by which the meteorite impact could have caused the mass extinction event. A 10km wide meteorite hitting the Earth would have been devastating, filling the atmosphere with superhot ash, dust and steam, and causing regional wildfires and a megatsunami across the Gulf of Mexico , which would have affected ecosystems for years.

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The impact of the meteorite could have also induced earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as shockwaves passed through the Earth. But eruption of the Deccan Traps would have also induced climatic change through massive increases in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly sulphur dioxide.

The committee ruled out volcanism as a cause of the K-Pg mass extinction, but another school of thought, led by Gerta Keller , suggests that we consistently overestimate the environmental effects of the meteorite impact and that more weight should be given to the climatic change caused by volcanoes. The prevailing view that the meteor impact directly led to the extinction event has also been challenged by evidence published in PNAS 3 that non-avian dinosaurs were already in noticeable decline around 50 million years before the Chicxulub impact.

Again, distinguishing the causes of extinction is difficult as many geological sites that show the K-Pg boundary have gaps, poor temporal resolution, and a lack of species continuity across the boundary. Fortunately, a site called Seymour Island in Antarctica exists where these complications do not pose the same problems.

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