Researchers discover new evidence that dinosaurs were strong swimmers

Follow @ScienceRecorder

An international research team has discovered new evidence that dinosaurs were strong swimmers, capable of paddling long distances. They posit that learning more about dinosaurs can help them track evolution over millions of years.

University of Alberta graduate student Scott Persons says that “from dinosaurs we’ve learned about colour vision in some of today’s animals, and the ancient animals are linked to the evolution of other life we take for granted, like birds and flowering plants.”

Persons and his colleagues studied strange claw marks discovered on a river bottom in China that is thought to have once been a route frequented by dinosaurs.

In close proximity to fossilized footprints of several Cretaceous era animals researchers located a series of claw marks that they think suggest a coordinated, left-right, left-right progression.

According to Persons, the claw marks were made by the tips of a two-legged dinosaur’s feet as it swam in the river with only its tippy toes scraping the bottom. The claw marks stretch a distance of approximately 15 meters which the researchers contend is proof that dinosaurs were able to swim with coordinated leg movements. These tracks were made by the meat-eating theropod dinosaur.

Fossilized evidence suggests that more than 100 million years ago the river in China experienced dry and wet cycles. According to Persons, the “dinosaur super-highway” has given researchers plenty of foot prints of theropods and four-legged sauropods to study.

According to a University of Alberta news article written by Brian Murphy, Persons and his colleagues plan to continue examining dinosaurs’ ability to swim with the ultimate goal that the analysis will offer information about animals. Persons says that paleontology has already yielded a few connections between life on Earth 65 million years ago and today.

“Want to know why our pet dogs or livestock have limited colour vision? It’s because early mammals sacrificed cones for rods in their eyes so they could see better in the dark and better avoid dinosaurs,” notes Persons in the news article.

The study’s findings were described in detail in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.