Field Guide to the Dinosaurs of North America by Strauss Bob

Author:Strauss, Bob
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493015085
Publisher: Falcon Guides

About sixty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe, nestled amidst rugged canyons and plateaus, lies a destination that’s near and dear to the hearts of dinosaur lovers: Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. It was here, in 1947, that researchers stumbled upon the tangled remains of thousands of Coelophysis individuals.

While they were undoubtedly smarter than many of the other species in this book, these doomed meat-eaters didn’t inhabit the Lost City of Dinosaurs, complete with paved streets, indoor plumbing, and Wi-Fi. Rather, it seems they were all caught in a flash flood some two hundred million years ago and their intertwined carcasses washed up in the same location.

Coelophysis is one of the few dinosaurs for which we have evidence of “robust” and “gracile” forms, one sex being about two feet longer and ten pounds heavier than the other. (One shouldn’t conclude that the bigger individuals were necessarily male. After all, birds are descended from dinosaurs, and in many species the females are the showier gender!) Even more remarkably, from a taxonomic standpoint, Coelophysis wasn’t all that far removed from the very first dinosaurs, which evolved in South America some fifteen million or twenty million years before—and which had spread not only to North America but to Africa and Eurasia by the start of the Jurassic period.

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