the footprint of a turtle stampede from 80 million years ago
Sometimes the older ones paleontological discoveries They do not occur in planned excavations and with large studies behind them, but by pure chance in places where no one should be. This is precisely what happened in 2019 on Mount Còrneo in Italy where two climbers entered in a restricted area of the natural park and they came across something that did not fit into the rock: hundreds of strange brands on a vertical wall. We already know what it is. Now, a study published in Cretaceous Research has revealed what those marks really are: the fossil trace of a stampede of sea turtles fleeing in terror from an earthquake that occurred 80 million years ago. The forbidden zone. The discovery is attributed to Luca Natali and Paolo Sandroni, who were climbing a limestone wall in the Scaglia Rossa formation. And what they found was neither more nor less than a canvas of more than 1,000 fingerprints distributed in an area of about 200 square meters. The location where they were found is no less, since it is key and at the same time problematic. As it is a vertical wall, which in the Cretaceous It was a flat seabed, access for scientists was almost impossible. That is why they had to resort to drones to be able to photogrammetrically map the site and study the furrows without risking the life of any researcher. CSI Cretaceous. In order to clarify this discovery, the researchers used the magnetostratigraphythe analysis of magnetic polarity of the rocks, to date the event to the Campanian, about 80 million years ago. The scene. To locate ourselves, 80 million years ago this vertical wall was a deep seabed that It was about 300 meters deepcompletely calm and muddy. But an earthquake shook the area, causing an immediate reaction: a group of sea turtles panicked. And as anyone would do, the reaction was to start swimming frantically towards deeper waters, hitting the bottom with their alerts and leaving those semi-lunar marks. Minutes or hours after the turtles passed, an avalanche of sediment caused by the same earthquake, known as turbiditecovered the footprints instantly, sealing them as if it were an “underwater Pompeii.” Why turtles? The identification of these traces has not been an easy task for the researchers who have had to discard among the possibilities in front of them. At first, other inhabitants of the Cretaceous were considered fish, plesiosaurs or mosasaurs. However, analysis of the furrows told a different story. The first thing to keep in mind is that they couldn’t be fish because the marks had bilateral symmetry. They also could not be plesiosaurs since the pattern of the markings did not fit with the four-fin movement of these reptiles. In this way, for the researchers, the semilunar marks, consistent with turtle fins, left no doubt that it was this marine animal of the time. Healthy skepticism. As is often the case in paleontology, not everyone is 100% convinced. Thus, there are different well-known experts who point out that, although the seismic theory is solid, attributing the marks definitively to the turtles requires more comparative evidencemaking it a rare fossil record in deep pelagic environments. Although what is truly interesting in this case is not the species, but the paradigm shift. Right now, most fossils told us about the death of an animal or its anatomy. But now we have seen how these footprints tell us about their behavior in a moment of terror experienced millions of years ago. Images | Cretaceous Research In Xataka | The skull that changes everything: a million-year-old fossil suggests that ‘Homo sapiens’ did not come from Africa
