TUMBLED-DOWN LIZARD

For the first time ever, dinosaur nerds (who sometimes go by the label paleontologist) have identified the 100-million-year-old fossilized footprints of an ankylosaurid, and a special one at that. You know the ankylosaurs, those guys from the Cretaceous who were low to the ground and built like a tank, with bony armour and a murder-mallet for a tail, doubtless for keeping carnivores at mating competition at bay. They look something like the ancient cousins of the armadillo and horned lizard or something thereabouts. Love em!

Unlike the common ankylosaur footprints of Tetrapodosaurus borealis, found across North America and which have four toes, this new species only has three. The new prints were discovered in Tumbler Ridge, BC, northeast of Prince George, and northwestern Alberta, an area synonymous with ankylosaurs since the discovery of trackway by a couple of kids 25 years ago. (This trackway also happens to be right alongside where British Columbia’s first dinosaur bone, perhaps 75 million-year-old Albertosaurus, was discovered by a Vancouver Island chiropractor on a camping trip just a year later in 2001...)

They, these three-toed ankylosaurs not the kids and the chiropractor, likely lived alongside duck-billed dinosaurs (the hadrosaurs, those pine needle and horse tail consumers) and more bird-like ones, maybe some giant crocodiles, and other ankylosaurs, the four-toed (and obviously much less cool) type. They lived in the coastal redwood forests between the Rocky Mountains and what was an inland sea, the Western Interior Seaway, covering most of what is today the Prairies.

This new species was given the name Ruopodosaurus clava, meaning "the tumbled-down lizard with a club" and referencing the mountainous terrain in which the tracks were found and the ancient animal's distinctive tail. Dr Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal BC Museum, and a crew of researchers from the Tumbler Ridge Museum and Tumbler Ridge Global Geopark, reported their new findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Woop woop!

For more of this sort of thing check out the series, BC's Fossil Bounty: