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

[Undertoad]

It's the Neatorama Monday collaboration image!



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]

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]

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 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]

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]

Welcome to Mann's Jurassic Chinese Theatre.

[glatt]

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.

[Snapple]

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]

Here's a pic of a trackway that I took in Namibia a couple of months ago. My brother for scale.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by snais

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.
You wouldn't be so complacent if you'd had a tobacco chewing, ninja, tom turkey, spit in your eye.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by snais

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]

Reminds me of that scene in Godzilla where Matthew Broderick is standing in the print, going, What? What?

[Nightsong]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

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]

Originally Posted by Snapple

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]

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:H...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

[xoxoxoBruce]

Shouldn't take long to clean up. The ones eating the tail might not even see the ones eating the head.