Re: Monster find at Hell Creek

[Denver Fowler <df9465@yahoo.co.uk>]

>Beautiful prints only a few mm thick can appear on the foreshore at Hanover  
>Point, Isle of Wight, England only to be washed away by the next few tides so  
>thickness doesn't seem to be important. 

Not really. Most of the IOW prints are visible because they are infilled with 
clay or sand of a different colour. It's not so much that the print/cast itself 
is only mm thick: most of the sst prints are pretty darned thick, up to a foot 
or more (!) and often show 3d twisting of the foot etc. really cool actually. 
The clay prints are still 6 inches deep or more: about what you'd expect for a 
large animal stepping onto soft mud. These thick prints get slowly serially 
sectioned by the erosion of the tide, and can look not-much-like prints once 
they get a little eroded.

Some iguanodon footcasts:
http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q290/df9465/iguanodon209-05x.jpg
http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q290/df9465/100_0075x.jpg

and I have US14 (UK13) size feet for scale.

There's a big range of tracks visible there.. sauropods, ankylosaurs, theropods 
and ornithopods of different sizes: thing is the big iggy prints are the most 
conspicuous.



As for size - with the bigger  beasts 
>unless there are great claw marks can anyone really tell the difference  
>between an ornithopod and a theropod from the outline? 

Yes they can.

And anyway.. the footprint described as t-rex from new mexico, is certainly 
theropod, and the sheer size of it would suggest a large tyrannosaur.

http://www.nmnaturalhistory.org/trex/specimens/tyrannosauripus.jpg

D.






      
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