May 14, 2007: How to spot T. Rex footprints

Undertoad • May 14, 2007 7:59 am
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It's the Neatorama Monday collaboration image!

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LiveScience image gallery offers up this beaut, calling it "How To Spot T. Rex Footprints". Says here this print is from a "theropod, the same kind of dinosaur that T. Rex was." I suppose. although I thought Rex's nasty talons would sink into the muck and give a different impression.

Be sure to visit our friends at Neatorama for more neato stuff all the time!
HungLikeJesus • May 14, 2007 9:12 am
That's not a T. Rex foot. That's a human foot. And it's attached to someone who usually goes around in shorts and hiking boots, I would guess.

Where's Melvin Whitefeather?
snais • May 14, 2007 9:19 am
Dinosaur fun fact: another famous theropod, the velociraptor - the scary ones that hunt in packs from Jurassic Park - was actually only about the size of a turkey. Spielberg lied to us all.

Oh and hello everyone :earth: i got linked over to the site from neatorama a while ago and have been looking through all the Image of the Day archives, which are amazing, and a great distraction from revising for my Biology exams. It is nice when something I'm studying comes up though, dinosaurs are awesome.

Anyway back to work!
Sundae • May 14, 2007 9:56 am
Welcome snais.

I'm not ready to give up being scared of velociraptors just yet - even waist high I believe they could do some damage.
Sheldonrs • May 14, 2007 10:13 am
Welcome to Mann's Jurassic Chinese Theatre.
glatt • May 14, 2007 10:26 am
If you think this is neat, and you are ever in Hartford, you should check out Dinosaur State Park just south of Hartford. Thousands of tracks discovered when the state was digging a foundation for a new Department of Transportation building. They have a big dome over them.

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Snapple • May 14, 2007 11:44 am
I'm sorry but I don't buy this image as being a real print. It looks like a place where water pooled and left an impression and then someone says it's a dino footie and people are all like 'ohhhhhhhhhhhh'. Well, i see the footprint of a twelve foot Donald Duck. As for the Hartford image above - tres cool!
barefoot serpent • May 14, 2007 12:22 pm
Here's a pic of a trackway that I took in Namibia a couple of months ago. My brother for scale.
xoxoxoBruce • May 14, 2007 3:25 pm
snais;343115 wrote:
Dinosaur fun fact: another famous theropod, the velociraptor - the scary ones that hunt in packs from Jurassic Park - was actually only about the size of a turkey. Spielberg lied to us all.


Welcome to the Cellar, snais.:D
You wouldn't be so complacent if you'd had a tobacco chewing, ninja, tom turkey, spit in your eye.
piercehawkeye45 • May 14, 2007 5:04 pm
snais;343115 wrote:
Dinosaur fun fact: another famous theropod, the velociraptor - the scary ones that hunt in packs from Jurassic Park - was actually only about the size of a turkey. Spielberg lied to us all.

Spielberg based the Velociraptor off the dinosaur Deinonychus, which means "terrible claw" in some random language.
Cloud • May 14, 2007 5:06 pm
Reminds me of that scene in Godzilla where Matthew Broderick is standing in the print, going, What? What?
Nightsong • May 14, 2007 5:25 pm
piercehawkeye45;343279 wrote:
Spielberg based the Velociraptor off the dinosaur Deinonychus, which means "terrible claw" in some random language.



Then, just after that release came the news of the utahraptor. To quote Wikipedia

Utahraptor had a huge curved claw on the second toe that could grow to 23 cm (almost 9 inches) long. Up to 6.5 meters (22 feet) long, 2 meters (6 feet) tall and 700 kg (1500lbs) in weight, Utahraptor would have been a formidable predator.[1]


Would have looked a lot like the Raptors from JP
Nikolai • May 14, 2007 5:44 pm
Snapple;343156 wrote:
I'm sorry but I don't buy this image as being a real print. It looks like a place where water pooled and left an impression and then someone says it's a dino footie and people are all like 'ohhhhhhhhhhhh'. Well, i see the footprint of a twelve foot Donald Duck. As for the Hartford image above - tres cool!


Well its often the reason why we find dino footie prints is due to the fact that rivers erode through many layers of rock eventually eroding through to the layer where once the mighty T-rex did a tap dance.

And to all the guys mentioning spielberg and the Velociraptors, you shouldnt be so worried about that and more worried about the dinosaur called the Giganotosaurus carolinii its about 47 feet long (14 m), 8 tons in weight, and 12 feet tall (4 m) which makes it roughly the size of T-rex and the scary thing is they proved this thing hunted in packs
snais • May 14, 2007 6:32 pm
That's one of the things that always gets me about dinosaurs - the sheer range of sizes. The longest dinosaur discovered so far (though only reconstructed from one vertebra) is a sauropod called Amphicoelias which may have been up to 60m long. I can't even visualise that in my head, wiki has a size comparison thing which is just incredible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Human-amphicoelias_size_comparison.png

can you imagine looking one in the eye?? What happened when one of those died, how long did it take before there was nothing left of it? Imagine the smell :whofart:
xoxoxoBruce • May 14, 2007 7:19 pm
Shouldn't take long to clean up. The ones eating the tail might not even see the ones eating the head.
Armygrognard • May 15, 2007 9:28 am
snais;343115 wrote:
Dinosaur fun fact: another famous theropod, the velociraptor - the scary ones that hunt in packs from Jurassic Park - was actually only about the size of a turkey. Spielberg lied to us all.

Oh and hello everyone :earth: i got linked over to the site from neatorama a while ago and have been looking through all the Image of the Day archives, which are amazing, and a great distraction from revising for my Biology exams. It is nice when something I'm studying comes up though, dinosaurs are awesome.

Anyway back to work!


Still and all, imagine a pack of those after you instead of pit bulls! :eek:
mitheral • May 15, 2007 9:03 pm
snais;343115 wrote:
Oh and hello everyone !


Welcome snais.
Cloud • May 15, 2007 9:13 pm
it's all just guesswork, anyway, and they keep changing their minds! --in 20 years, scientists will all decide that dinosaurs were talking worms, or something
glatt • May 16, 2007 9:56 am
Cloud;343769 wrote:
it's all just guesswork, anyway, and they keep changing their minds! --in 20 years, scientists will all decide that dinosaurs were talking worms, or something


It's not guesswork at all. It's science. You look at evidence (data) and you draw conclusions from what you see. The reason they keep "changing their mind" is that new data is found, or somebody has a different theory that fits the data better than the old theory. This is progress, and it's good.
Griff • May 16, 2007 11:23 am
barefoot serpent;343178 wrote:
Here's a pic of a trackway that I took in Namibia a couple of months ago. My brother for scale.


Extremely cool!