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The World's Deepest Dinosaur
FiReaNGeL writes to tell us BiologyNews.net is reporting that Norway has uncovered their first set of dinosaur remains. The catch? They found it 2,256 meters below the ocean floor. From the article: "It is merely a coincidence that the remains of the old dinosaur now see the light of day again, or more precisely, parts of the dinosaur. The fossil is in fact just a crushed knucklebone in a drilling core - a long cylinder of rock drilled out from an exploration well at the Snorre offshore field."
god is really fing with us now
He he, I'd mod you as Funny if I had points currently. But really, this part of the world has been pretty tectonically active recently, at least as recent as the opening of the Atlantic ocean along a spreading ridge. Jeez, almost anything could've happened - except a flood. Flood deposits are terrestrial, and don't affect the ocean floor (at least not to a depth of 2000 m). Some washing out could have occurred instead perhaps, but this would be impossible to distinguish from the bone(s) being washed out by a river, tide, or just plain ol' waves. As Norway was once a fluvial plain (rivers), and rivers are common deposits in which to find bone (Hell Creek and Two Medicine Fms. in Montana, for instance, preserve almost all fossils in what are interpreted to be fluvial deposits), then it's easy to imagine a river washing a fossil out to sea here as well. Knucklebones (do they mean phalanges?) are relatively round and small, and so could travel far and without significant abrasion or breakage - even as far as the continental shelf, apparently. Washing out by a river is the most parsimonious, and most likely, explanation.
ID of the bone as that of a Plateosaurus isn't so difficult either - prosauropods have certain very distinguishable bones (well, like anything I guess), and as they were in the process of going from bipedal to quadrupedal I bet their knucklebones were unique, and diagnostic. Much of western Europe is full of Plateosaurus specifically, and so this is also the most likely.
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Better go now, running out of room.
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