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Dinosaurs in paleokarst: Why not?


pefty

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Today, instead of bemoaning the paucity of marine cretaceous rocks in my state, I reframed the situation as follows:

"In the Cretaceous, most of Missouri was not ocean but land, with lots of exposed limestone that dinosaurs were likely walking around on."

This led me to the following question: Do we have no fossil examples of dinosaurs that fell in sinkholes / caves / paleokarst and were preserved there, perhaps discovered during quarrying of the limestone? We definitely have such examples for fossil mammals, reptiles, etc., including Pleistocene (Ocala), Pliocene (Pipe Creek Jr.), and Miocene (Gray Fossil Site)... So why not earlier? Why not dinosaurs? Surely there were paleokarst processes in action during dinosaur times. As possibly useful information, there was definitely regional hydrothermal activity here in the Mesozoic, based on the Jurassic emplacement age of southern Illinois fluorite.

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There’s no Dinosaurs because of the rocks age. But maybe one day there will be a dinosaur found preserved in one of these but for now it’s unlikely.

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In Britain there have been possible Triassic dinosaurs preserved in Rhaetian fissure fillings from a much older age.

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2 hours ago, Pterygotus said:

In Britain there have been possible Triassic dinosaurs preserved in Rhaetian fissure fillings from a much older age.

 

Hi. Just to add to this. The Triassic dinosaur Pantydraco was discovered in the 1950s in a quarry just outside of Cardiff. It was about the size of a cat and found in a fissure full of clay within a Carboniferous limestone quarry. The bones of this dinosaur are in the vaults of the NHM London. There are numerous bones found in these Welsh fissure fills including some of the worlds oldest mammals - Morganucodon.

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There are also some Iguanodon remains in Karst-holes in devonian chalk in Nehden, Germany, there is an artikle about those in the german wiki.

Best Regards

J

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Try to learn something about everything and everything about something

Thomas Henry Huxley

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