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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."
Fast-moving plates?
2256 meters after 200,000,000 years gives a sinking speed of *11 microns per year*.
2256 meters after 200,000,000 years gives a sinking speed of *11 microns per year*.
From this page, it says that the Snorre field is located approx 140km west of the coast. The ocean depth is at around 300-300m, but the reservoir is some 2500m down. It also says that the reservoir differs from most of the other fields in the North Sea in that the rock consists of fossil riverbeds from a time (triassic period) when the North Sea was dry land containing big rivers.
I'm guessing it doesn't really matter how much it has moved, since things were probably very different then anyways.
Whales have extremely dense bones, and they also didn't evolve until about 30 ma. Judging from the approximate age of the bone (oil drillers know all this stuff), as well as any diagnostic features, it would be easy to designate it as a Plateosaurus, which is an extremely common dinosaur in western Europe, and is from the Late Triassic (about 200 ma). Even if crushed, a Plateosaurus is the most parsimonious explanation. As I said in another comment, the prosauropods were going from bipedal to quadrupedal and, correct me if I'm wrong prosauropod people, I bet the "knucklebones" were unique, and perhaps easy to ID. I also bet that this bone was washed out to the ocean from a river, as Norway was covered in rivers during this time. You're assuming much less once you actually have a bit of background on the time period and the region.
OR a sedimentary deposit rate of 11 microns per year.