#opod

When giant footprints became death pits

Sometime between 165 and 155 million years ago in the Jurassic era a series of minor tragedies enveloped a succession of small Theropod dinosaurs as they ambled about their business in marshy lowland. Some of their huge Sauropod cousins were also wandering around the area browsing the local vegetation, their huge feet and substantial weight creating large footprints one to two metres deep as they did so. These churned areas rapidly became quagmires of quicksand into which the inadvertent Theropods unfortunately stumbled, one after the other.

When excavated from the Shishugou Formation (consisting of 6km of river and lake sediments) in Xinjiang Province, China, the result presented itself as a vertical stack of up to 5 small dinosaurs embedded in deep pits of river sand and fresh volcanic ash. As each new creature got stuck in the resulting slurry, its struggles helped bury the last unfortunate deeper, as did further churning by larger dinos. The resulting fossils (mostly ceratosaurs, see http://bit.ly/2pleHDb) display excellent preservation, indicating rapid burial, though a few were clearly subject to surface scavenging which dispersed the bones. Three such pits were found, one with 2 dozen species represented, and one of which contained the earliest Tyranosaurid found so far.

Their ill luck was palaeontology's good fortune, as this assemblage of fossils is helping to fill a sparse zone in the fossil record in which both dinosaurs and early birds were going through a burst of speciation, and several early members of later families of Jurassic Park fame emerged during this time. Along with dinosaurs, small crocodiles, turtles, early mammals, a variety of amphibians, and plenty of petrified wood (after which the formation is named translating as Stone Tree Valley, preserved by the silica in the volcanic ash from a nearby chain of smoky mountains) were also preserved.

Loz

Image credit: Painting: Michael Skrepnik Photo 2: Jim Clark 3: David Eberth

http://bit.ly/2pdfqGH

Both supporting Luffy, while taking care of each other ♡

Law says that now he will "do whatever he wants" because he is now free and defeated Doflamingo and the first thing he does is leave with Sabo. They are a married couple... I don't need more information.