He Went Thataway
by Jon Burch Photography
Title
He Went Thataway
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Capture/faa Watermark Will Not Be On Your Finished Photograph.
Description
This image shows one of the dinosaur trackways at the Purgatoire River track site in the Comanche National Grasslands south of La Junta, Colorado. Also called the Picketwire Canyonlands tracksite, the area is one of the largest dinosaur tracksites in North America.
The more than 100 trackways, made up of more than 1500 individual footprints, were made by both biped and quadruped dinosaurs. The tracks occur in limestone of the Jurassic Morrison Formation formed along the shore of a large freshwater lake at the time the tracks were made. A previously unmapped region was discovered in 2012, where removal of alluvium revealed 90 new trackways, showing parallel prints giving rise to a theory of herding behavior in the giant animals.
In 1879, O.C. Marsh, a professor of paleontology at Yale University, announced the discovery of a large and fairly complete sauropod skeleton from Morrison Formation rocks at Como Bluff, Wyoming. He identified it as belonging to an entirely new genus and species, which he named Brontosaurus excelsus, meaning "thunder lizard". Brontosaurus was a large, long-necked quadrupedal animal with a long, whip-like tail, and forelimbs that were slightly shorter than their hind limbs. The largest species weighed up to 15 tons.
Elmer Riggs, in the 1903 edition of Geological Series of the Field Columbian Museum, argued that Brontosaurus was not different enough from Apatosaurus to warrant its own genus, so he created the new combination Apatosaurus excelsus to describe it more precisely. According to this way of thinking, the dinosaur tracks found along the Purgatoire River were made by Apatosaurus.
Image copyright 2016 Jon Burch Photography all rights reserved.
Uploaded
June 21st, 2016
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