What kinds of information can paleontologists obtain from dinosaur footprints?
Footprints provide information about the environments in which dinosaurs lived, their gaits, whether or not they traveled in herds, and other information that skeletons do not necessarily divulge.
What can scientists infer from fossil footprints?
What can a scientist infer by looking at fossil footprints? Fossil footprints give clues about animals size in behavior, whether it walks on two legs or four or if it lived alone. What are three ways that the remains of organisms have been preserved? Tar, Amber, by freezing.
What can paleontologists learn from a trace fossil?
Trace fossils can offer paleontologists and other scientists valuable information about extinct lifeforms that body fossils cannot. For example, a trace fossil of a dinosaur nest can give clues about how the young of that species were raised.
How are dinosaur footprint fossils formed?
When dinosaurs walked through the mud they left footprints, just like you do on a muddy trail. Over time these footprints were filled with sand or small pebbles and eventually hardened into rock. The footprints were preserved for millions of years until erosion brought them to the surface where people can see them.
What can fossils tell us about dinosaurs?
By studying the fossil record we can tell how long life has existed on Earth, and how different plants and animals are related to each other. Often we can work out how and where they lived, and use this information to find out about ancient environments.
How old is the oldest poop?
The poop samples come from rock layers dated to roughly 50,000 years ago. That’s far older than other ancient wastes, such as those found at Turkey’s Catalhöyük, one of the world’s earliest large villages, dating back 6,000 to 7,000 years, and what might be 14,000-year-old human coprolites at a cave in Oregon.