Fwd: Lower Jurassic dinosaur footprints from Xinjiang, China (free pdf)

[Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com>]

Apparently this posting sent earlier did not go through to the DML.
Apologies if people received it already.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:13 AM
Subject: Lower Jurassic dinosaur footprints from Xinjiang, China (free pdf)
To: dinosaur@usc.edu


Ben Creisler
bcreisler@gmail.com


A new paper in open access:

XING Li-Da, Martin G. LOCKLEY, WANG Qi-Fei, LI Zhong-Dong, Hendrik
KLEIN, W. Scott PERSONS IV, YE Yong & Masaki MATSUKAWA (2014)
Earliest records of dinosaur footprints in Xinjiang, China.
Vertebrata Palasiatica 52(3):  340-348
http://www.ivpp.cas.cn/cbw/gjzdwxb/xbwzxz/201408/P020140811539646656990.pdf

Although Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a vast territory, its
fossil tetropod track record is scant. In recent years, this situation
has begun to change and a variety of Jurassic and Cretaceous tetrapod
tracks have been reported and described from Xinjiang, including
tracks attributable to birds, non-avian dinosaurs, and pterosaurs.
Here we report on the first dinosaur track discovered from Lower
Jurassic deposits in Xinjiang. The tracks are those of a small
theropod and are oldest known dinosaur tracks in Northwest China. The
tracks are provisionally assigned to cf. Changpeipus isp., which
resembles well-known tracks in the Grallator-Eubrontes plexus, which
dominate tetrapod ichnofaunas in the Early and Middle Jurassic both
within China and globally.