Posted on Jan 29, 2020 in Climate Change, Evolution, Science
They co-existed with “truly giant volcanic events that can only be studied from the geological record, because they do not have modern equivalents, although they can occur in the future of the Earth,” said Emese M. Bordy of the University of Cape Town about dinosaurs and synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their closest fossil relatives, who left their footprints preserved in the bed of a fast-running seasonal stream that may have offered reprieve in this “land of fire” in southern Africa at the start of the Early Jurassic mass extinction, before the Gondwana supercontinent broke up.
The Karoo Basin of southern Africa is well-known for its massive deposits of igneous rocks left behind by extensive basaltic lava flows during the Early Jurassic. At this time, intense volcanic activity is thought to have had dramatic impacts on the local environment and global atmosphere, coincident with a worldwide mass extinction recorded in the fossil record. The fossils of the Karoo Basin thus have a lot to tell about how ecosystems responded to these environmental stresses.
“These volcanic eruptions were mind-bogglingly voluminous,” Dr. Bordy said, noting that basalt piles in southern Africa can be a mile thick — and that’s after more than 100 million years of erosion and weathering, reports The New York Times. “We would like to get a more complete picture of what was happening in this part of Gondwana at that time. Not only for lessons on the deep past, but for lessons for our future.”
In this study published January 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Bordy and colleagues, Bordy and colleagues describe and identify footprints preserved in a sandstone layer deposited between lava flows, dated to 183 million years ago. In total, they report five trackways containing a total of 25 footprints, representing three types of animals: 1) potentially small synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their forerunners; 2) large, bipedal, likely carnivorous dinosaurs; and 3) small, quadrupedal, likely herbivorous dinosaurs represented by a new ichnospecies (trace fossils like footprints receive their own taxonomic designations, known as ichnospecies).
These fossils represent some of the very last animals known to have inhabited the main Karoo Basin before it was overwhelmed by lava. Since the sandstone preserving these footprints was deposited between lava flows, this indicates that a variety of animals survived in the area even after volcanic activity had begun and the region was transformed into a “land of fire.” The authors suggest that further research to uncover more fossils and refine the dating of local rock layers has the potential to provide invaluable data on how local ecosystems responded to intense environmental stress at the onset of a global mass extinction.
“The fossil footprints were discovered within a thick pile of ancient basaltic lava flows that are ~183 million years old. The fossil tracks tell a story from our deep past on how continental ecosystems could co-exist with truly giant volcanic events that can only be studied from the geological record, because they do not have modern equivalents, although they can occur in the future of the Earth,” added Bordy.
Source: Bordy EM, Rampersadh A, Abrahams M, Lockley MG, Head HV (2020) Tracking the Pliensbachian-Toarcian Karoo firewalkers: Trackways of quadruped and biped dinosaurs and mammaliaforms. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0226847. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226847
The Daily Galaxy, Andy Johnson, via Public Library of Science and New York Times Science
Image at the top of the page shows footprints from the ichnospecies. Bordy et al. 2020, Plos ONE
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