Rock climbers have found large dinosaur footprints on the cliffs of Mount Gole, left by China's most ferocious carnivorous dinosaur 190 million years ago, filling the gap in the footprints of the Asian Kayan Tower.
Dinosaur footprints found in the Gele Mountain area of Chongqing | Courtesy of Xing Lida
Author | Liu Sen Director of the Exhibition Department of Liaoning Paleontological Museum
Editor-in-charge | Gao Peiwen
The morning sun shines on the lake, and a dinosaur begins its day of foraging. It took a leisurely little step, remembering a small puddle it had found yesterday, where some fish had been left behind because of the rise and fall of the lake. Remembering the delicious taste of the fish, it couldn't help but speed up its pace and trot all the way, leaving a clear series of footprints on the wet mud floor on the shore of the lake.
This scene could have occurred more than 190 million years ago, in the early Jurassic, the era of reptiles and gymnosperms. The lake has now become a continuous mountain, and the footprints of this dinosaur, under the geological movement, have traveled through time and frozen on the mountain rocks.
In May 2020, Chinese scientists announced the discovery of a large number of dinosaur footprints in Chongqing's Gele Mountains, created by the most ferocious theropod dinosaur in the region at the time, the Chinese dragon, which was trotting. This is the best-preserved Jurassic Caryan Tower footprint group in Asia, which provides important evidence for studying the distribution and evolution of dinosaur fauna in the early Jurassic period in China.
Dinosaur footprints are found on cliffs
In the early Jurassic Period, more than 190 million years ago, the area of gele mountain in chongqing is now a huge lake. Today, the mountains and cliffs make it a place for rock climbers.
"My friend and I stumbled to this cliff because we were on the wrong road, and just as we were trying to climb it with our bare hands, I suddenly noticed that there were some animal footprints on the stone." Footprint finder and also mountaineering enthusiast Jing Casual said.
These footprints are distributed throughout the middle of the cliff, most of them with three toes, and somewhat resemble "chicken feet". Jing took these footprints and sent them to Xing Lida, a dinosaur footprint scientist in Beijing.
The dinosaur track site map (top) and sketch map (bottom) found in Gele Mountain National Forest Park | Courtesy of Xing Lida
On July 5, 2019 (first discovered in March), Xing Lida led his team straight to the site of the discovery. After taking pictures, measuring, drawing and other investigation work, detailed information about fossils was obtained:
On two quartz sandstone surfaces about 3 meters apart, a total of 46 three-toed theropod footprints were found in two layers. Of these, the surface of the first layer contains 7 traces – consisting of 32 footprints in total, with another 12 isolated footprints, and the second layer consisting of 2 isolated footprints. The average length of the footprints of the 7 tracks in the first layer is 24.1 cm, the largest footprint is 35 cm long, and the smallest footprint is 16 cm long.
Based on its stride length and combined with geological survey data, it is confirmed that this is the footprint of a carnivorous dinosaur that lived 190 million years ago. More precisely, this is the Hochska Rock Tower Footprint and is the best-preserved Jurassic Card Tower Footprint Group in Asia.
No thumb footprints
The Kayanta footprint is the genus name for a type of footprint formed by a larger three-toed bipedal theropod dinosaur. ("Theropods" refers to a large class of dinosaurs dominated by carnivorous dinosaurs, named after the "meat-eating monsters that run on two legs".)
The "tracers" of this footprint are mainly the basal tailed dragons (a dinosaur whose tail was hard and could not bend sharply" in the theropod family in the early Jurassic period, such as bislobita, Kayanta hunting dragon, Chinese dragon and so on.
Among them, we are most familiar with the bispindrosaurs that once appeared in "Jurassic Park", and their most notable feature is that they have two longitudinally arranged ridge crowns on their heads, about 4 to 6 meters long, and their mouths are full of sharp teeth, which can hunt down some large plant-eating dinosaurs. At the same time, the front of their mouth and nose is narrow and soft, and they can flexibly reach into the bushes or stone crevices to find out and eat other small animals, and they are one of the first large carnivorous dinosaurs on Earth.
The footprints of Kayan Pagoda are widely distributed in the Jurassic strata of North America, northeast Europe, Africa and Asia around the world, and its biggest feature is that it does not retain a thumb mark, retaining the plant toe pad mark of the fourth finger, completely separated from the rest of the mark.
This is because the thumbs (first finger) and small toes (fifth finger) of the theropod carnivorous dinosaurs that formed the footprints of Kayan Tower shortened or degenerated during evolution, and could not land during walking and running.
So the footprints of the dinosaurs we see are all formed by the three toes of the second to fourth toe, similar to the footprints left by some of our current birds (such as the red-bellied golden pheasant) when they walk.
The footprints of the Kayan Pagoda found in Mount Goraku are so large that they only show three-toed | Courtesy of Xing Lida
Sketches of all 46 Footprints of Kayan Pagoda discovered this time | courtesy of Xing Lida
The dinosaurs that form the footprints of Kayan Tower walk in a similar way to the living red-bellied golden pheasant, pay attention to the feet | from the network
Because the dinosaur footprint is only an imprint, unlike bones, which are hard bodies, the vast majority of footprints disappear shortly after being stepped on, and footprint fossils are formed only under certain conditions. For example, the humidity, viscosity and particle size of the surface soil are required to be relatively moderate (generally easy to leave footprints in the seashore, lakeside and river beach areas); the footprints should be quickly buried by sediment and other sediments; after burial, the soil layer that preserves the footprints needs to be sunk by geological movement, and it will eventually become fossils after diagenesis.
They are like "close-up shots" of dinosaur activities recorded by nature with natural video recorders, and they are precious materials for studying dinosaurs. According to the results of the geological survey in the Gele Mountain area of Chongqing, the "tracer" of the Footprint of Kayan Pagoda discovered this time is likely to be a Chinese dragon.
Ferocious Tracemakers
Chinese dragons belong to the bisceralosaur class, and they also have two crowns on their heads, but due to their hollow interior, the crown of Chinese dragons is not suitable for fighting, and its main role is to attract the opposite sex during courtship.
The Chinese dragon was about 5 to 6 meters long and weighed up to half a ton, living mainly in China, and was the most ferocious large carnivorous dinosaur in the region at that time. Paleontologists once found fatal wounds on the body of Lu Fenglong, who lived at the same time and was 8 meters long, presumably caused by Chinese dragons.
At the same time, the head structure of Chinese dragons shows that they are also good at hunting small animals, even fish in the water.
The morphology of the fossil shows that its creator was doing the gait of the trot at the time. This is where the imaginary picture at the beginning of the article begins.
The Chinese dragon is restored, with a body length of about 5 to 6 meters, a weight of up to half a ton, and a very fierce | Courtesy of Xing Lida
Although the Footprints of Kayan Pagoda are widely distributed in the world, no conclusive Kayan Pagoda footprints have been found in Asia. This discovery enriches the records of the Kayan Pagoda footprint group in China and even Asia, and further proves that the footprints of lower Jurassic dinosaurs in Asia and even the world are mostly theropod dinosaur footprints, and the footprint morphological types show consistent diversity, which is of great significance for studying the distribution and evolution of dinosaur fauna in the early Jurassic period in China.
The research was jointly completed by Xing Lida, associate professor of China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Dai Hui, senior engineer of Chongqing 208 Institute of Geological Relics Protection, and Wei Guangbiao, research librarian of Chongqing Geological Survey Institute. The latest results were published in the form of papers in the well-known BRITISH SCI journal "Historical Biology".
Address of thesis:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2020.1769093
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