Footprints bring science one step closer to understanding south African dinosaurs
Dinosaurs have captured people’s imaginations more than any other ancient creature. These reptiles – some big, some small; several carnivores and other herbivores – rose and dominated the world’s landscapes for more than 135 million years during the period known as the Mesozoic. Today, dinosaur fossils can be found in many parts of the world, contained in a succession of rocks. It is a series of rock strata or units in chronological order. South Africa and the main Karoo Basin in Lesotho, for example, contain many dinosaur fossils in a succession of rocks formed between 220 million and 183 million years ago during the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic period. These ancient relics include body fossils (bones) and trace fossils, which are signs in ancient sediments in the form of footprints and burrows in the ground. Body fossils can help in re-creating ancient life forms, understanding what they looked like, their sizes, and even how they grew and evolved. The problem is, i...