UTSA | Catalyst 2020-2021
Illustration: Ziqi Yu
Digitizing Dinosaur Tracks
A UTSA-based team is changing the footprint of Texas paleontology By Daniel Castella Around 125 million years before the foundation of Texas, a different kind of society was roaming its vast canyons, fertile plains and lofty mountains: that of the dinosaurs. Now, a San Antonio-based group of geoscientists is studying—and digitizing—ancient tracks imprinted in the terrain of the Lone Star State to gain new insight into the environment and behavior of these prehistoric beasts. “Texas dinosaur footprints have been studied since the 1930s but never in this detail,” said Dr. Thomas Adams, curator of paleontology and geology at the Witte Museum in San Antonio. “They occur in 24 separate counties, with multiple localities per county, and each one can have anywhere from one to 300 footprints, so we’re talking about thousands of tracks and hundreds of individuals over a long period of time.” “There are things you can learn from dinosaur tracks that you can’t learn from skeletons,” said Dr. Dan Lehrmann, professor of geosciences at Trinity University and a key contributor to the project. “The trackways tell us about their behavior.”
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