"It will be interesting to see what else comes out of the block once it is fully prepared. "Only when the fossils are brought back to the lab and carefully prepared, as the research team is doing now, can they be positively identified," he told me. "It's very slow, meticulous work – all has to be done under microscopes on big mounts because it's such a massive specimen."Īnd until that immense task is complete, we can't draw too many conclusions, cautions D'Emic. "You move a centimetre off the bone in a day," he added in discussion with KUER in Utah. Its impossible to overstate how pervasive the quicksand meme was.Before the Apollo 11 landing, there was widespread fear that the moons dust might act like 'quicksand.' David Bowie wrote a song called 'Quicksand' about Hitler. After the 1960s, quicksand was used more as a comedic or ironic device, such as in Blazing Saddles and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. "The preparation will be quite challenging even in the lab," Kirkland told me. The peak of quicksand-related films occurred in the 1960s when one out of 33 films (3) included some sort of a quicksand hazard. Were these quicksand-bound dinosaurs moving together as a family group? Or were they all drawn in separately? The answers may lie deeper within the big block, but we may have to wait a while – it's going to take scientists a long time to expose them. ![]() Movies love to depict such dinosaurs as pack hunters, but there's actually very little direct evidence for this. One of the biggest questions on Kirkland's mind, though, is whether these predators were hunting together. Utah Hiker Gets Stuck in Chest-Deep Quicksand at Grand. "That kind of sample would allow scientists to ask a number of questions, such as how long it took Utahraptor to grow up or how its bones and body proportion changed as it grew," D'Emic told me. In 2015, a man from Texas died after becoming stuck in quicksand on the San Antonio River, the only death to occur in recent memory. What's more, Utahraptor is a dromaeosaur, a type of dinosaur only rarely found in North America, let alone in such large numbers. But according to Kirkland, this new dinosaur find would be "the first published attribution of a predator death trap due to quicksand."Īnd palaeontologists are excited about this site for more than the quicksand. Finding so many dinosaurs of one species can be a big deal, notes palaeontologist Mike D’Emic, who wasn't involved in this excavation. "Predator traps" like these are known from other fossil sites, such as the La Brea tar pits in California, which preserve an unusually high abundance of Ice Age carnivores for the same reason. The commotion attracts a predator on the lookout for an easy meal – but what looks like harmless mud turns out to be a deathtrap. It's easy to imagine one such hapless herbivore getting stuck and struggling in the sticky sand. ![]() But why did so many of these carnivores end up stuck? The answer may lie with the other remains identified within the rock – bones belonging to small plant-eating dinosaurs called iguanodonts. The site's geology, the scientists found, was very similar to areas where quicksand forms today.
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