Over 100 Middle Jurassic tracks from Scotland
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This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash dino dig.

Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 537th episode, we've got an interview. It's been a little while since we had an interview. This week it's with Tone Blakeslee about some exciting dinosaur footprints that he found in Scotland. Yes. We also have Dinosaur of the Day, Ornithodesmus, the bird link dinosaur.

And our fun fact, which is that for 20 years, a boulder full of dinosaur footprints sat in the front of a school in Australia, keeping that dinosaur footprint theme going. So it sat there for 20 years or was there for 20 years before someone found it? Oh, no, it got moved there on purpose. Okay. I was wondering if it was just sitting there for 20 years or then someone was like, wait, there's a dinosaur footprint on that. Kind of. Okay. We'll wait till the fun fact. Getting ahead of ourselves.

But before we get into all that, as always, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week we have 10 existing patrons to thank, and they were randomly selected via random number generator. And they are Geraldine, DinoDork, Risa, Thane Spinalover, Shane Kylosaurus, or Shan Kylosaurus, probably Shane Kylosaurus, Indie, Evelyn and Frankie, E-Ray, Rachel,

And Benetoplauticus. All excellent names. Yes, Benetoplauticus is an updated name. Fantastic choice. And as a reminder, you can always send us a message in Patreon if you want to update your shout out name. Yes. And also this month, we're continuing our celebration of 10 years of the podcast and also our book with National Geographic. And if you're at the Tyrannosaurus tier and above from now until the end of May, you're

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This week, we're going to just jump right into our interview. So without further ado, here's our interview with Tone Blakeslee. But of course, we have an extended version of this interview for our patrons. So if you'd like to check that one out, check it out on your premium content feed.

We are joined this week by Tome Blakeslee, who's a master's graduate from the University of Edinburgh, and he's the lead author of a new paper about 131 dinosaur footprints on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Thank you for having me. So the first question I have to ask is, were you the first one to discover the footprints as dinosaur footprints, or did someone tip you off to their existence?

I think I was definitely one of the first of four of us in total who found these impressions and identified them formally as dinosaur footprints.

So it was August 2019. It was a very windy and blustery day and the sea was on its way in. And we'd been alerted to this site's potential by two locals, Anne Martin, who's a Gaelic singer, and her husband, John White, who were kayaking. They came into the bay and they noticed some curious impressions in a platform of sedimentary rock.

So I went down with Anne again, Dougald Ross, who's the curator of the Staffan Dinosaur Museum, a fantastic museum with lots of dinosaur remains found on the island on display there, and a student who was visiting Anne at the time, Victoria Bradder. And so we went down there, we had a look at these impressions, which we determined were mud cracks at the time.

Just as we were leaving, it always happens when you're leaving a site, the best find reveals itself. And we found at the foot of this big boulder, a three-toed impression of a theropod dinosaur. It really stood out to us. It was sharp. It was crisp. You could see the really sharp claw marks on it, the pads and the

Dougald, incredibly, managed to shift. He's a crofter by trade, as well as the curator. He managed to shift this boulder so that we could see the footprint in full. And wow, it really stood out to us. So we found free that day, all of the meat-eating theropod variety.

And so it was then the pandemic year, not able to go anywhere. And the following year, I went back down there, 21 in July, found 30 footprints in one day, which was, I was just so shocked. I wasn't expecting this site to be so substantial. But I think what was really striking is, I suppose, the extent of the

sedimentary rock which is preserved in, in that it's ripply. You can see there are these really

proud ripples that stand out, this rippled sandstone. It looks like they were just made yesterday and someone's hit the pause button. And there they are. They're quite mesmerizing. But I mean, little did I know that there was another 100 to find. Yeah. Yeah. I saw in the documentary the footprint, I assume it was that footprint next to the boulder. That was a large boulder that you managed to shove out of the way. Yeah.

Yes, these boulders should not be moved under any circumstances, not for one's back and also the fact that these boulders, you know, they've got sea life under them and they should generally not be disturbed. Unless there's a dinosaur footprint, then it's worth it. Maybe. So it's a mix of the types of tracks, right? It's megalosaurs and sauropods?

Yeah, yes. So we believe that Frito footprints were made by a group of Middle Jurassic age dinosaurs called megalosaurs. We don't know what species. We will never know unless we find one dead at the end of its tracks, of course. But megalosaurs were the apex predators of the time. They were the ancestors of T-Rex by several millions of years. And

And the sauropods, the more rounded footprints, we think that they were made by a relative of Diplodocus, something called Cetiasaurus.

But the more specific technical term is non-neosauropod or basal neosauropod. And we've been able to determine that by looking at certain characteristics of the footprints that we have preserved at the site. Unlike our theropods, which are completely bipedal, walking on just twos, sauropods are quadrupedal. And we have evidence of their handprints as well as their footprints, which they're different.

They're not all just round tire-type footprints-like structures. The handprints are crescent-shaped, and they have this very long, protrusive thumb digit that's impressed in the lower corner of that footprint. It's called a Pollux footprint.

The fact that's there and the fact that it's relatively shallowly crescent allows us to sort of diagnose the footprints to that type of dinosaur group. Okay. And also I'm guessing the age and general area too. Very much so. Yes. Because these are middle Jurassic, right?

Yes, Middle Jurassic. Such a significant time in the dinosaurs' evolution. It's really remarkable. They were just getting going and just evolving into a variety of forms which later go on to define their reign. It's such a mysterious time because there's very little Middle Jurassic aged rock found around the world and we're very lucky on the Isle of Skye to have this rock

here at our fingertips to go and explore and have a look to see if we can find any remains of dinosaurs, whether it be footprint or bone. Yes. Yeah, that's very cool. I think it's really interesting that it sounds like in these particular sets of tracks anyway, we can tell a little bit more about the sauropods and narrow it down more about what kind of sauropod it might be versus the megalosaurs. But then if you're

not trained, or maybe you're not even necessarily looking for a sauropod footprint. I feel like those might be harder to spot than a theropod footprint. Yes, it's funny you should mention that because some geologists had visited the site throughout the 80s and into the early 90s, and they had identified the sauropod footprints as being made by fish that

They were called fish resting burrows. And when you look at them, I mean, that's sort of understandable because they're pancakes compared to the very deep impressions that you would expect from such a lumbering giant. Why is it that they're so flat? That's what struck me when I first saw these. Admittedly, I went to the site before I came across that piece of literature which described them as fish resting burrows. So,

I sort of knew that they were dinosaurs beforehand, but it's a very interesting state in which they exist. That's to do with the substrates which they were walking in. They were walking in a very thin layer of sand that was deposited on a very hard layer of mud. So, whenever any sauropods walked through this thin layer of sand, rather than sinking down really deep, they

they could only sink down by about 10 centimeters or so. As a result, the sand spread horizontally across the mud and was pushed upwards to form these mounds that surround each of the footprints. These are called displacement rims. But at the site today, a lot of these have been eroded and you see the sort of onion ring-like structures, the cross sections of these displacement rims

But where they're present, they really do stick out. And they have the ripples which surround these footprints forming over them, indicating that the water levels, it was variable. And the wind had acted on that surface and caused those ripples to form across the footprint displacement rims. Interestingly, not the sauropod footprints themselves. But on the mounds, definitely, yes. Interesting.

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You've got the megalosaur and the cediosaur type sort of walking in the same general direction, right? Yes, yes, you do. You do have those dinosaurs seemingly coexisting within this same space. What you have to remember is that these footprints, they weren't made at the same exact time. They were made at a very similar time.

So at the site there's this pair of trackways that interestingly cross over one another, and at one point you can see the second trackmaker stepping over the first, which tells us that they were made at slightly different times. And we have further evidence

to suggest that that time was maybe, it could have been several hours, several days. It depends on how well exposed this environment was. We can't be sure because we were never there at the time. But we have evidence from looking at the ripples. The ripples go through part of the heel region of one footprint, a set of footprints more than the other, which gives us an idea of their relative exposure prior to being buried here.

which is really cool. You just tell that this is a time average space and that it's a canvas that's a work in progress.

Yeah. So, it's like one of them walked and left tracks and then the other one was walking sort of not quite parallel and then decided to step over rather than get its foot partially on it? Step on. It stepped over the footprint, as in overprinted another footprint. So, that was very interesting to see. Those particular footprints were very similar in length. You can estimate the hip height of these dinosaurs.

by multiplying the foot length by four. It's an interesting mathematical equation that was devised and it's tried and tested over many, many years. And it's revealed these dinosaurs have hip heights of about 1.8 meters because the average foot length within that track weighs 45 centimeters in length. So 1.8 meters corresponds very well with a megalosaur-type dinosaur.

Big for the time, not as big as theropods would eventually get, but definitely big enough to eat most things that have ever walked on land. For middle Jurassic, yeah. 167 million years ago, give or take. Yes, yes. 167 million years ago.

A time when the island was just so different to how it is today. You look around Scotland, it's just rolling mountains, you know, harsh winter storms and really cold weather. We'd have none of that in the middle of Jurassic. It was tranquil and subtropical, warm and humid.

you probably would have felt very sticky because it's such a very, it's such a warm, warm place to be in, especially since that not only was it a hothouse climate at the time, but also the Isle of Skye was situated where Northern Spain is today owing to continental drift. And this place was so,

much flatter than it is today, very much like our sauropod footprints. Very vast, this space was spanning several kilometers in either direction, this big flat, this big estuary, which was crisscrossed by lagoons and maybe some vegetated pockets in between. And the dinosaurs presumably were coming to this communal area. Maybe they were using it as a sort of pit stop for

a service station to have a drink. We know our sauropods were under no threat. They were in no hurry because we can estimate how fast they were walking

based on taking the measurements between each stride in each trackway. And we've been able to determine they were walking, some of them walking at half of the human average walking speed, which is about five kilometers per hour. So they were moving at two and a half kilometers per hour. A leisurely stroll. Yeah, a very, very slow walk. Our theropods, meanwhile, they were walking

But compared to us, we'd have to jog to keep up with them. They were going at about eight and a half kilometers per hour, eight kilometers per hour. That's much faster, but not running. No running yet. No chase scenes have been recorded yet. Yeah, I think it's interesting to see how the ancient paleo environment was to the modern environment. The only thing that I think you could say is in common is that they're both at the edge of water.

Yes. Yes, that's what I find quite poetic about this place is that

it's still by water and you can stare down at these footprints and watch the tide come in and wash over those footprints as if the water levels of this lagoon had risen and the water was just washing over it. It's mesmerising and I keep meaning to put it up as a separate video on my YouTube channel and I will do.

That satisfying video of a footprint being filled in by water with the sounds and everything. It should be an ASMR compilation. Yeah, I made a note. That was maybe my favorite part of the documentary too, was watching the tide or a wave come in and fill the footprint. And it really reveals it too because everything's sort of the same color and there aren't really sharp delineations on all the tracks and everything. But when it fills with water, it's almost like,

you know, nature is just like highlighting it for you. Like, Oh, there it is. There's the footprint right there. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's, you know, one of the reasons why they probably went so unnoticed until 2019 is because they were frankly really difficult to see and,

Some of them were at the time under quite a fair amount of seaweed. You'd have to draw them back like curtains to be able to see them properly. And even with the seaweed drawn back, it's still a struggle. And it's only until we really got down to the serious field work that

which I conducted with a team from the University of Edinburgh during my master's, that we were able to truly reveal what these things looked like, not just from the ground, but from the air above. That sort of visual, did that inspire the documentary? Because it's kind of unusual that you would get a documentary to go along with an article in a journal. Yeah, yes. So...

That's interesting. The documentary was made by me. I made it. I didn't hire a crew. I didn't hire any cameras. It was all my equipment, the same camera that was used to document the footprints, to take all the photographs on the ground, to build the individual 3D models, same camera. And I studied radio and television when I was doing my undergraduate, but I majored in geography.

but I minored in that because I had some interest in media, because I was doing it at school, the interviews as well. And so I wanted to take the next step and apply my knowledge of media

to my interest and passion for study and research in paleontology. And being able to channel that passion through that particular medium was incredibly satisfying. And yeah, as you say, a lot of studies generally stick to the paper. Researchers are generally very busy people who like to write these papers. But

you know, when it's something that's as popular as dinosaurs, everybody loves dinosaurs, don't they? Especially your listeners. I know dino. I know dino too. Yeah.

And I'd like to the papers can be a little bit inaccessible, not only in the language, but also not everybody has the time or the patience to read a long paper. And even an abstract to can have a lot of wording in it. Or sometimes things are behind paywalls. There's a lot of barriers there.

to it. But it's nice because it almost functions as like a video abstract of sorts where you can, I watched the video before reading the paper and I already had a good idea of what all the research was about because you had already summarized it and you show it visually. It's a very visual topic footprints. So being able to see them and see the track makers, see a person standing next to them rather than trying to figure it out from a scale bar and a

diagram somewhere. It's a very good way to convey the message of what the discovery was like. Yes, thank you so much. I was juggling between doing the research and filming when we were doing the field work, which was particularly stressful, directing the very talented drone technicians of the University of Edinburgh Airborne Research and Innovation Facility, Tom Wade,

Craig Atkins, they're fantastic at what they do with that drone. A fantastic drone. We were very fortunate to get a very high-resolving camera, I think 45-megapixel resolution camera. We flew the drone to about 12 meters high. We engaged in three-and-a-half-hour-long drone flight. It required seven battery changes,

The way it works is you fly a drone up and down and up and down the site, like printing out a picture, effectively. But you're taking these pictures at various different angles. So you've got four oblique angles taken of the site and then one where the camera is pointing directly down.

And I used those photographs to build 3D models for a method called photogrammetry. So the way it works is you take a series of overlapping images and you import those images into a specialist computer program. And the program identifies certain points within that image. So say it's a footprint. It identifies that footprint within the image and says, OK, that footprint is located here.

in these sets of images. And it pinpoints them in a, it reconstructs that footprint in a virtual space based on where it's positioned in each of the overlapping photographs. And so when you do that for the entire site, you then end up with a ridiculously high resolution reconstruction of the entire track site and all the footprints that are

within it. That's one of the advantages of 3D models that they, because we did it in such a way that preserved the scale within them, we're able to take those really accurate measurements that you couldn't necessarily take in the field because you couldn't see those features.

I can imagine it would have taken 10 times as long. You hold this piece of string over this part of the toe. And can you hold the string over the length so that we can see where they cross? Good, good. Now we draw a line. Like you see the cross between the length and width lines. You can draw a line between each length and width. And we can measure the pace length.

Can you imagine how long that would have taken? It would have been an absolute nightmare. And

We have a program here in the UK called Time Team, where they only have three days at any given archaeological site to investigate it. But yeah, we had three days to do our fieldwork on the Isle of Skye. So I was really feeling the pressure, especially on top of the fact that I decided to film some of that behind the scenes footage to show people, you know, this is what we do. This is how it works.

I think that's very important to demonstrate that because it allows people that extra insight into what goes on to make these models a reality and something that can be downloaded onto your computer.

What took longer, the research or making the documentary? The research. Definitely the research. The documentary was a labor of love and took a solid two months of nonstop editing. Every day I was working on this documentary and figuring out what goes where and restructuring certain parts and

recording loads of lines again and again and

it was quite overwhelming, but not as overwhelming as doing the research itself, which is a mammoth task. That wasn't the only thing that I did in my masters. I was doing another chapter on another set of footprints found elsewhere on the Isle of Skye, which is hopefully going to come out later in the year as another publication looking at much smaller dinosaur footprints. I don't want to spoil anything at this point, but yeah,

Yes, we're looking at two different locations. But the Prince Charles chapter, which I was doing alongside that other one, that took a lot of, it was a big learning curve. I learned a lot of new things for the very first time whilst I was doing it. You know, learning things on the go, learning about these calculations and

that I have to do to calculate the speed at which these dinosaurs were moving. The concept of ichnotaxonomy, which is an absolute nightmare. The classification of trace fossils by just, it's just so, so...

Yeah, I don't want to go there again. I've been there once, and I think it's safe to say that I should never go back. Ultimately, it's the shape of what's present at the site that counts. We devise a shape-based scheme, which can be globally compared with other similar shapes, similar footprint shapes found around the world.

For the Ichnotaxa, if I can take you back there just one last time, did you go with Eubrontes? Was that the results or did it become something more exotic? So if you want to get into the nitty gritty, Ichnotaxonomy-wise, we've got four morphotypes. One of them

most similar to Megalosaurus ispha. Megalosaurus is sort of like a generic name given to Megalosaur-type footprints, which span pretty much most of the middle to late Jurassic. And then the sauropods, they're two echnotaxons, which are similar, Breviparopus and Parabrontopodus. And so in our paper, we say that they're Breviparopus Parabrontopodus-like footprints.

Because the footprints encompass the characters of both those ignotaxons, I believe Breviparopus was first described from tracks found in Morocco in 1980.

And Parabrontopodus was found at Paluxy River in 1994, I believe, in the publication by Lockley et al. And it's very interesting to read about those footprints. There are other shapes at the site that look slightly different to Parabrontopodus.

the main ignotaxons that we identified, but I'm pretty confident that they are related to the four theropods. Megalosaurus, there are some that encompass the other characteristics like Cayentopus,

So that's a much more... so the foot of that is much more widely devaricated between the second and fourth toe. And we noticed that with some of the footprints at Prince Charles's Point, the ones that are about 30 centimeters long in length and the digits were much more slenderer compared to our megalosauropus ones.

And those footprints, they're also similar to the Megalosaurus icefoot footprints found in Morocco and Portugal. And I just decided that the similarity is too overwhelming to ignore, especially when you have so much variation in Cayentopus compared to Megalosaurus.

Interestingly, we have one footprint, one theropod footprint, which is... So theropods typically leave tridactyl impressions, free-toed impressions. We had one that left four...

evidence of four toes. We had digit one impressed, well, the claw mark of digit one impressed into this, what would have been a relatively deeply impressed toe. Bear in mind the theropod's feet were much more slender than our sauropods by comparison, which are

like elephant's feet. So these, I suppose, have the potential to sink down a little more, relatively speaking. And so the side-retracted digit one managed to leave its impression in this very unusual isolated footprint, which is...

slowly getting beaten up by the wave, sadly. But, you know, it's preserved as a 3D model for everyone to enjoy. But that's a very interesting footprint.

There were some early Cretaceous footprints in Germany which bared resemblance to it, but there were some Megalosauropus ones in Uzbekistan, which some of them had that claw, digit one claw, impressed. And again, the morphology, so that's the shape-based characteristics of the footprint, were too similar to ignore. Yeah, that's really cool. And that extra fourth...

toe the information you could get from that even though in the grand scheme of the

print seems like such a minor thing. It could give you so much information in terms of that fourth digit, where it is on the foot, how long potentially it is, all that kind of stuff. That's really cool that that's preserved. Yes, very much so. Yes. I like to the, I saw that a lot of the sauropod tracks aren't just the, sometimes you just get those potholes with almost no information. It's just like, well, that's probably a sauropod because it's just a big hole in the ground. You actually have some toe details on a lot of the tracks that,

Indeed, indeed. Well, the toe impressions are quite rare at Prince Charles's Point. You may see one in at least one of each trackway at the site that has toe impressions left in it. There's one particular track which I had to photograph by hand to build a 3D model of because the trackway was covered over by boulders and I had to shift

the boulders afterwards and then go over it with a camera pointing down at the end of a monopod. I was slowly moving along trying to overlap the images and that generated a beautiful 3D model which is much higher resolution than the drone imagery

because it's much nearer to the ground, in fact, two meters above the ground. But yes, the toes of the sauropods seem to slant slightly off to the side. They're entirely slant, but they slant slightly to the right on this right footprint that we have. And that's sort of indicative of them

Neosauropod, which I like to liken to new wave sauropods. Like the new wave music was in the 80s, these were the new kids on the block. They had recently evolved and were beginning to roam around. And we do have evidence that there are at least two sauropod species on Skye. Some really

Really nice tooth fossils have been found in prior years, which look slightly different to one another, to the point that it allows us to, when comparing them, identify these two different species were roaming around at the time. But the problem with teeth is

and isolated bones, which we generally tend to find up here, is that they don't necessarily tell you about what was living exactly in that space because these bones traveled because this was a water-based space.

environment in many ways. I mean, it has to be in order for the sediments to accumulate like they do. And these bones were being tumbled down these rivers and lagoons. And so you don't necessarily get a 100% clear picture of what was living in this environment. The footprints tell us about what dinosaurs were exactly living in this space.

Yeah, that's true. It's a good snapshot of like an actual day, day in the life on the Isle of Skye. Very much.

It's also interesting that they spent so much time in the water as opposed to, was it like mudflats a little bit further away? That's a local trend which we find on the Isle of Skye, that the meat-eating theropods and the sauropods, plant-eating sauropods, generally seem to spend time in these lagoonal environments.

We can go into slightly more finer detail with that by looking at... So in more brackish environments that were slightly saltier, more near the sea, when the sea levels were slightly higher, we find that the sauropods seem to be more common than...

the meat-eating counterparts. But at Prince Charles's Point, which would have been a freshwater lagoon at the time, we find that the theropods

are way more common than the sauropods. Oh, weird. Yeah, it's peculiar, whether it's environmental preference, whether it's coincidence, or whether it was the fact that they were situated a lot nearer to a particular favorable food source. Mm-hmm.

We're not entirely sure, but we know that sauropods did tend to venture out into the water a bit more. And it's possible that when they did venture out into the deeper water, theropods couldn't catch them. They'd have to swim for it. Of course, we do have some evidence from elsewhere in the United Kingdom of swim tracks that

this distinctive, these three lines. We don't have any yet on the Isle of Skye,

But another thing that's interesting that I noted in that part of the discussion is that we don't have any other kind of dinosaur represented at Prince Charles's point. So no stegosaurs, no ornithopods. Maybe these lagoonal spaces were not close to any favorable environment of theirs. So maybe they preferred the more terrestrial-based environments, places that were a lot nearer to sources of vegetation, perhaps.

that could be indicated by their presence in severely exposed mud-flat environments that we see at other locations on the Isle of Skye, like at a place called Brothers Point. I saw these footprints yesterday.

And I still just, I can't get my head over how small they are. These stegosaur footprints there, the, the, the, the footprints, um, the Pez, it's about the size of my hand. And which is probably about, um, 15, 17 centimeters long. And the Manus, the handprints are even smaller. They're like fists that have punched down into the mud. It's, it's,

I can't get my head over that, just how small they are. They weren't very big dinosaurs because I always thought that they were much bigger somehow. It sounds like you're getting into specializing into trackways, footprints.

Well, it seems to be the direction that I've been going in as of late. I've been involved in other footprint studies, obviously the one that is yet to come out, and that will come out later in the year. I'm doing some more work on the South Coast relating to footprints, a self-led study. And I'll be excited to talk to you more about that later on when that paper comes out.

But yeah, I'm excited to say that I managed to secure myself a PhD position. And yeah, that's exploring something very, very different. But I do like the idea of keeping a foothold in dinosaurs. Foothold, huh? Foothold, yeah, very good, very good. I was wondering when the first one would get in. And yeah.

and investigating the middle Jurassic rocks here up on the Isle of Skye, there is nothing more satisfying than going out and finding a slice of bone embedded in a rock and wondering, I wonder how deep that penetrates. I wonder what that could be. And seeing the footprints on Skye as well, the new footprints at these sites,

and thinking, I wonder how well that would preserve as a 3D model. Once you start something, it never really goes away. For me, yes, you do move on in life, but the landscape here on Skye and the fossils that you find here and knowing that they can tell us so much more about such a poorly known time is something that captures my imagination and my interest

For our listeners, if they want to find out more about you and your work going forward, where is the best place? So the best place to follow me is on Instagram, Tone Blakesley, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, Tone Blakesley, and follow me on Facebook. I'm called Fossil Tone. And basically, I post updates on paleontological related items from dinosaur footprints, and

to natural history items as well. We have had some fantastic auroras on the Isle of Skye recently, being so the maximum at the moment. It was a fantastic one about four days ago. What a way to conclude that day of the paper being released with a fantastic light show.

that you couldn't see with the naked eye, but the camera was having the time of its life. That's for sure. I'm very envious of my camera, actually. It's seen some amazing things. But yeah, follow me on those platforms to hear more about what I get up to in the world of paleontology and where it might take me and where it might, I suppose, inspire you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. That's all right. That's all right.

Thank you so much, Tone, for chatting with us and sharing not only your paper, but your documentary. That is amazing. Yeah, it's not often that a new article that we're excited to read about comes with a documentary. Sometimes you get a documentary like a year later.

Yeah. When it's really picked up and people get excited about it. But I can't remember ever having seen like a co-occurring documentary with a paper. It's so cool. Yes. It's so easy to digest, especially in this case where it's so visual. So we'll have a link to that in our show notes if you want to check it out. And you can watch it and or read it in whatever order you choose. Yes. And we will get to our dinosaur of the day in just a moment. But first, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.

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And now onto our dinosaur of the day, Ornithodesmus, which was a request from Tyrant King via our Patreon and Discord, so thanks! It was a dromaeosaurid that lived in the early Cretaceous in what is now the Isle of Wight in England. And it looked like other raptors, because dromaeosaurs are raptors. It walked on two legs, it was covered in feathers, it had a small head and a long tail. It's estimated to be almost 6 feet or about 1.8 meters long.

It probably had sickle claws on its second toes being a dromaeosaur. And it was probably carnivorous. It's,

had an interesting history. Originally, it was thought to be a bird based on its hip bones, the sacrum. And then later it was considered to be a pterosaur. But then eventually, more pterosaur bones were found of a different individual. And a study found that Ornithodesmus was a small theropod and the other bones assigned to it were pterosaurs. So the type and only species is Ornithodesmus cluniculus.

It was described in 1887 by Harry Seeley based on six fused vertebrae from the hip, the sacrum, that William Fox had found. And Seeley, as I mentioned, thought the fossils were from an early bird. So he named it Ornithodesmus, which means bird link. Yeah, I was thinking, I'm seeing where that Ornitho part comes from at the beginning of that name when you're saying they thought it was a bird, then they thought it was a pterosaur.

You don't usually have dinosaurs named Ornitho. I mean, you have some, the really bird-like ones. Yeah. But... And raptors are pretty bird-like. That's very true. Good point. So the species name...

Clunicolus means little buttock and refers to its small thighs. That's really funny. Yeah. I also like that with that name, just going back to it being Ornith for bird, this is in 1887, right? And that's back well before it was established.

that dinosaurs definitely evolved into birds. Well, Huxley thought so too. He did, but I don't know where Harry Seeley was on the debate. And I don't know where the peer reviewers and all that was at the time because you've got somebody noticing this is a very bird-like animal from some bones and then it turns out to be a dinosaur. Yeah. It's just a fun, you're on the right track. Seeley, I think, was on the side of

They believe it was birds and pterosaurs being really closely related. So later in 1887, the same year that Ornithodesmus was named, John Hulk wrote in an anonymous paper, though I wasn't able to figure out how people knew it was him. And he suggested the fossils were from a pterosaur instead. And Seeley later agreed when he described the skeleton of a pterosaur that he thought was...

a close relative to Ornithodesmus. He actually named it another species of Ornithodesmus, Ornithodesmus latidens. And Seeley considered the sacrum of both species to be similar. For more than 100 years, it was the skeleton of Ornithodesmus latidens, that is what people thought of when they were thinking of Ornithodesmus, and not the fragmentary skeleton of Ornithodesmus cluniculus.

Yeah, because that was what you said, basically just hip bones. Yeah. So instead of thinking about hip bones, they're thinking of this more complete skeleton, which was a pterosaur. Yeah.

But then in 1993, Stafford Howes and Andrew Milner re-examined Ornithodesmus cluniculus and found that it was a theropod, not a pterosaur. And they suggested that it was a troodontid, but a later study found it to be a dromaeosaurid. Jeez. Take it from a pterosaur to one of the most other problematic groups, a troodontid. Well, but then we got to raptor. That's good. The dromaeosaurid group is a little more stable. Yeah. Yeah.

And since it was named in the 1800s, it means Ornithodesmus is one of the first known dromaeosaurs. Oh, that's fun. Retroactively. Yeah. We thought it was a pterosaur, an early pterosaur and an early bird. And now we think it was a dromaeosaur, one of the first. It was a bird, a pterosaur, a plane, a raptor. And anyway, all the known pterosaur bones that were named, well, that used to be Ornithodesmus became...

a new pterosaur genus, Istiodactylus, that was named in 2001. Yeah, because you have almost a chimera type situation. You've got pterosaur bones assigned to a genus, which is now going to be a dinosaur. You got to pull those out, put them somewhere else. Yes. I like that name. Yeah, it is a nice name.

Yeah, but we're talking about the dinosaur. Okay, sorry. Ornithodesmus. So the 1993 study found ornithodesmus to be similar to sorenithoides, troodontid, but they said it wasn't for sure a troodontid because of, quote, the limited nature of the holotype, which makes sense. It's just those hip bones.

To be fair to Seeley, in 1887, troodontid, ornithomimid, and oviraptorosaur dinosaurs hadn't been recognized yet. Yeah. So he had some limited options. Yeah, there weren't very many dinosaurs described at that point. Certainly not that many late diverging theropods. Mm-hmm.

Also from the 1993 paper, they wrote, quote, Yeah, that's like what I was saying.

They thought it was a bird, and then people were like, oh, no, that's totally wrong. It's not at all like a bird. It's a pterosaur. And then it comes back, oh, it's a dinosaur, and it's a dinosaur that's pretty closely related to birds. Yes, it is. And going even further, a 2019 study found that it was in the family Unanlogidae, which is a subgroup of dromaeosaurs. Largely in South America. Although this one wasn't.

Well, that's cool. Some other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place as Ornithodesmus include theropods like Neovenidor and Aristosuchus and ornithopods like Iguanodon and Hypsilophodon, sauropods like Pelorosaurus and the ankylosaur Polycanthus.

And other animals that lived around the same time and place include fish, lizards, turtles, crocodilians, birds, and mammals. It's a cool dinosaur. It is. Not as much for how cool the find is, but the story behind it is pretty neat. Yeah. And all the mix-ups. And being on the right track without even realizing it. Yeah.

For a fun fact, I'm going to go back to our interview, which was all about dinosaur footprints. And the fun fact is that for 20 years, a boulder full of dinosaur footprints sat in the front of a school in Australia. And by sat in front of school, I mean this rock was in the foyer of the school. It's very much placed there on purpose.

It ended up in the school about 20 years ago because one of the teachers was married to a geologist who found it in a nearby mine. And that area was going to be blasted. So he donated the boulder to the school. That's a fun centerpiece for the foyer. Yeah. Yeah. And this is so this is a high school in Queensland, Australia. And in 2021, there were news reports of dinosaur fossils found in the area. And this boulder is covered in large tracks. You can see the three toed footprints there.

So someone decided to ask an expert to go look at it. And paleontologist Anthony Romilio examined the boulder and ended up identifying 66 footprints from 47 dinosaurs. What? Yeah. And these are from the early Jurassic, almost 200 million years ago. That is a lot of footprints. They must not be that big. Some are bigger than others, and it's also a really heavy boulder. Interesting. I'm not entirely sure how that worked, but...

It's amazing to think kids just walk past this boulder every day for years. Yeah. I'm looking at a picture of it. There's at least one super obvious print. It looks like it might be a natural cast. So the boulder itself would have filled in the footprint and made sort of a 3D projection of the foot sticking back out of it again.

And it's very obvious. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm also impressed that it survived 20 years in a school without being damaged at all. Yeah. People really respected the dinosaurs. Yeah, well, it was just kind of there in front of the school. The paleontologist who examined it also went to a nearby coal mine and saw another boulder with two dinosaur footprints. So a lot of footprints in these mines. Yeah.

Well, for now, the boulder is still at the school, but they're in talks about where to relocate it to a more public venue. That's true, because you can't just wander into a school. That's frowned upon. Yes, but that's pretty cool. That is very cool. I wish my school had dinosaur footprints when I was a kid. Jealous. Although, I'm pretty sure if it was at my school, it would have been damaged. I guess I had troublemakers at my school. Wow.

Hard to know. They're well-behaved in this part of Queensland, I guess. And that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. If you want to join our Patreon, especially at that T-Rex level and above, and get a signed copy of our book, head over to patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll have even more dinosaur news to share. Thanks again, and until next time. I'm a dinosaur.