One thing about being in palaeontology is that you tend to cover quite a diverse range of subject. Working with the material available means that even specialists in one group or on one method with often dabble quite widely in other areas of research. There’s not too many theropod guys who haven’t at least looked at ornithischians or sauropods or even crocs, pterosaurs and lizards and have probably published on a few of them. So too it is with things beyond bones and again a lot of people will have had some involvement with work on eggs or trackways.
In my case this means that for all my interest in all living things and my tendency to take in local pigeons and squirrels as much as species in zoos and museums, I now also get interested even by things like random footprints in bits of sand. Even this little can provide a bit of food for thought. Here for example the bird tracks are rather deeper than those of the cat and seem to interact with the substrate in a different way. The sand hasn’t changed as such between the two sets being laid down but of course could have been wetter or drier at different times – even a single base can react very differently according to local conditions and affecting how tracks are made and, by extension, how we interpret them.
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