Nils Knötschke

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS 🦖

You often see me working with dinosaur bones 🦴 but I’ve also spent a great deal of my career excavating their footprints. In my opinion, the tracks of these prehistoric animals deserve far more attention than they usually get in reports and posts.

So yes, I’ve been walking with dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were long gone, of course 🦕 but their footprints were still there.

At Münchehagen, around 140 million years ago, sauropods, theropods and ornithopods crossed a landscape now preserved in stone. Our excavations revealed exceptionally long iguanodontid trackways, beautifully preserved theropod footprints with claw and toe-pad impressions — and a giant sauropod making a remarkable 90° left turn. Beautiful fossil wave ripples preserve the texture of the ancient surface beneath their feet.

These tracks record movement and changes of direction, offer clues to interactions between animals, and allow us to estimate their walking speeds.

At the Late Jurassic Langenberg quarry near Oker in the Harz Mountains, Holger Lüdtke and I rescued five natural footprint casts in 2003 before quarrying destroyed the tracksite. Years later, archival photographs allowed its reconstruction in 3D. 📸 No. 10

Those large theropod tracks hint at a dramatic chapter in the story of the dwarf sauropod Europasaurus: falling sea levels may have opened routes for large predators to reach its island habitat, potentially threatening the resident dwarf fauna.

“Theropod Blitzkrieg Bop” was our prehistoric nod to the Ramones. 🤘

Some of my career memories are measured in footprints.

If you need more info about these beautiful tracks ask & follow: @frilu0415
He is the track manager 🐾🤘🏼!

#WalkingWithDinosaurs #DinosaurTracks #Münchehagen #Europasaurus #Palaeontology