Yesterday I saw an documentary on dinosaurs on the National Geographic Channel (don't know if that's worldwide or if it's a "European version" of the channel, like Discovery Channel is over here) about theropod dinosaurs. Can't remember the name of the documentary series either, but it's part of NGC's Dino Week, so it's one of five episodes (monday I think it was on dinosaurs generally, tuesday it was on herbivores with some emphasis on sauropods and yesterday is was on the "greatest killers" or something like that, i.e. theropods). Most of the information was already familiar to me and like most such programs it was aimed at the more general public, but still I never miss such programs if I have the chance. And this time there was even one item of information that was both interesting and totally new to me. Bob Bakker was shown working with a team in a quarry at Como Bluff called Nail Quarry, because the first find there was a nail that he himself had found (and not something an amateur had found and showed to a paleontologist to ask what it was, I thought the way Bakker mentioned this was rather funny, because he said it a sort of tone like he never actually found anything himself ;-)). It turned out that the quarry includes only big sections (Bakker mentioned bits and pieces estimated around 1 to 2 tons in weight each, things like complete hindlimps and tails of big animals) of only big animals (again he mentioned that the smallest individual they found parts of was a juvenile Diplodocus estimated at about 5 tons total). In total, quite a lot a different species, with just three or four different species of large theropods alone and numerous different large herbivores. Most of the bones had been gnawed on and only one type of shed teeth was found: those of Allosaurus. Both the shed teeth and the toothmarks showed evidence of mediumsized adult and small juvenile Allosaurus inviduals, which led Bakker to conclude that this was a den, lair or nest of a pair/family/group (whatever) of Allosaurs. A location where adults would drag large pieces of prey to and where the young, who were still to small to fend for themselves, would be waiting and the meal would be eaten by all. I had not hear anything about this previously. What further information is available about this site, the remains found there and the above interpretation? Has anything about this been published? If have missed a bit of info because I've been unsubscibed for some time, so this might have been on the list already. Any information about this is welcome. Met vriendelijke groeten, Jarno Peschier P.S. I tried browsing the archives first, but without a search engine it's very difficult to find anything specific, especially when you're at work and should in fact be working on a functional design of an intranet site instead of persuing your interest in dinosaurs. ;-)
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