Dinosaur Tracks & Escape Rooms

This episode is brought to you by the Colorado Northwestern Community College. Join them for two weeks digging up fossils like dinosaur bones in northwest Colorado this summer. For details, go to cncc.edu slash paleo26. It's that time of year where you can get an exclusive patch from us, but only if you're a dino-it-all in our Patreon community. For the first time ever, we're doing a sauropod this year, Bajotosaurus, and it turned out great. If you want to see it, head over to patreon.com slash inodino, and if you want to get it, make sure you join at our Triceratops tier or above by February 28th. Hello and welcome to I Know Dino. Keep up with the latest dinosaur discoveries and science with us. I'm Garrett. And I'm Sabrina. And today in our 558th episode, we've got a bunch of news and an interview. Yes, our pre-interview segment is all about dinosaur tracks. So there's new track sites, swim sites, mating dance arenas around the world that tell us about the behavior of theropods, ceratopsians, and sauropods. Wow. And I bring this up because I see track sites as kind of like puzzles, and that is very much related to our interview with David Spira from Room Escape Artist, who we talked to about dinosaur escape rooms. There are a surprising number of those too. Yes. We also have our dinosaur of the day, Cegnosaurus, a therizinosaur with interesting teeth, which is not usually what you think about when you're thinking about therizinosaurus and their large claws. I think about, yeah, they have kind of an unusual face, and I often forget that So many dinosaurs had teeth and things that look like bird faces. Yes. And last, we have our fun fact, which is that turtles probably feared earthquakes more than sauropods, as a new track site with 1,000 paddle-shaped footprints likely shows turtles stampeding in panic after an earthquake. Hmm. Interesting. We'll have to wait to hear more. Mm-hmm. But before we get into all of that, we'd like to thank some of our patrons. And this week, we have 10 new patrons to thank. we've had exactly 10 new patrons join as of this recording at the shout out level. And they are Carcavedontosaurus, Brian, Ari Pops, Steph, Jordan H., Juan, Sharon and Rob, Nathan, Clever Girl, and Sophia. Amazing. Thank you so much for being a Dino-it-all and joining our community and supporting the show. Yes. I liked the Clever Girl one. I had to check. And I think that's the first time we've had that shout out. Oh, good choice. Nice. We also have our Bajadasaurus patch, which will be mailed out at the end of February. Might explain some of these new patrons joining if they're into sweet sauropods with big old neck spines slash sales. Yeah. And if you want to see that patch, even if you don't want to get it, that's fine. You can just check it out. It's on patreon.com slash inodino. We just pinned it to the top of the page so you can see it there. And then if you want it, you can join our Patreon at the Triceratops level or above before February 28th. And if you are a patron, make sure to update your address so we know where to send it. I'm cutting in with a news item that came out after we finished recording the episode. The Science Museum of Minnesota closed for a day due to the ongoing ICE, meaning United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, presence in Minnesota. Their museum president released a statement which I would like to read, but first, if you're listening with children and don't want to expose them to what's going on in Minnesota. I completely understand. No one should have to deal with what's going on there right now. If you want to jump ahead until after some mild descriptions of violence, you can jump ahead eight minutes to the uplifting part of the news story that should be at about the 11 minute 30 second mark. But if there was an ad at the beginning of the episode, add another minute to be safe. Now for the statement from the Science Museum of Minnesota's president, Allison Rempel-Brown. She said, quote, the past two weeks have been painful as we've watched Operation Metro Surge unfold across the Twin Cities. Many of us feel shock, fear, anger, and profound sadness. Our neighbors and community members are targeted, particularly those who do not appear white. Families are separated. Children are abducted. Older citizens are dragged out of their homes wearing only shorts and Crocs, the killing of Renee Good in the street, another killing of a brave observer, Alex Preddy, after a day of peaceful protests. All of this is horrendous and toxic. The mob mentality of ICE is putting everyone at risk. The sense of safety that should be the foundation of any thriving community is lost, particularly when it's our government that's acting so lawlessly. Some people have posited that the January 23rd statewide boycott of shopping and work was economically counterproductive. Even though I studied economics, this is not necessarily the way to pulse the day. I would measure it by the number of people from all communities coming together to raise their voices and create change, highlighting the dangers ICE poses to our state. I often reflect on the role of a museum, especially in moments like these. Many think of museums as repositories of knowledge and things, places where we come to learn about the natural world, explore scientific phenomena, or marvel at the mysteries of the universe. We are all of those things. We are also a gathering place for family and friends and people who don't even know each other. We are spaces where community happens. Right now, that role feels more critical than ever. Some might wonder what a science museum has to contribute to a conversation about immigration enforcement. Science is about evidence and critical thinking. It's about looking at data and drawing conclusions based on what we can observe and measure. Study after study shows that immigrants, regardless of documentation status, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. The evidence also tells us that these enforcement actions don't make our communities safer. They make us more fearful, more fractured, and less able to thrive. Brown, the president of the Science Museum, also shared a great explanation of the impact on science, saying, quote, science is also a human endeavor and therefore by definition informs and is informed by our values as a community. Our values tell us that science is better when everyone can participate in learning about and celebrating the world we share. The atrocities ICE is committing against our communities are not the products of evidence-based policy. They're expenditures of enormous taxpayer resources to achieve outcomes that run counter to public safety, economic stability, and community well-being. As an institution dedicated to scientific thinking, we cannot be silent where policy so fundamentally contradicts the evidence and runs counter to our deepest held values, end quote. We also corresponded with Alex Hastings, the Fitzpatrick Chair of Paleontology at the museum. We have interviewed twice on the show before. He shared with us that, quote, our attendance is markedly down recently, which is unquestionably tied to the pervasive ice presence and comes at a time that we're already struggling financially. We've also had many field trips canceled or postponed to indefinite future dates. Specific to paleo, we had a college class from South Dakota that had planned months ago to visit the museum and tour the vault with us, which they canceled for fear of ice stopping their van, end quote. That group from South Dakota just wanted to come see the paleo lab, and in particular the coprolite collection, so I'm tempted to make a joke about how fossil poop is being kept from the students by another kind of poop, but I will refrain. Because the museum is private property, Alex said that they have also posted private property signs and done trainings on where to deny ICE entry. Alex also shared with us that they have a paleo volunteer who doesn't feel safe leaving their home to come to the museum. They are a U.S. citizen, but that is not enough to guarantee their safety. The reason people, including U.S. citizens, are afraid to leave their houses in Minnesota is because in the U.S. it is now officially legal for the government to arrest people based solely on appearing non-white or having an accent. Kavanaugh stops, named for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the concurring opinion, allow federal agents to detain anyone based on their perceived ethnicity, spoken language, and or occupation. If the person is a U.S. citizen, they aren't supposed to be held beyond a quote brief encounter, but ICE also isn't supposed to be using pepper spray on protesters, arresting the media, tear gassing children, breaking into people's houses without judicial warrants, doxing quote-unquote enemies, or killing people, so this doesn't seem to be preventing their behavior. I have a lot of family in the Twin Cities who have been affected by ICE. One of them works at a school where three quarters of the students aren't showing up for class. These are American citizens, but because of Kavanaugh stops, they could be arrested for going to school while speaking with an accent. This is actually happening to children. Now, I need to give a trigger warning because I'm going to give a specific example of a child being arrested, which I do not believe is widely known about, but I think it's important to give an actual example so people realize it's not just an abstract fear coming from nowhere. I'm going to share an example that I can give without accidentally doxing someone in my family because I have a lot of family in the area. I feel that this is needed because it's easy to watch the news and lose the humanity of what is happening or see victims being vilified. This event, like many, is recorded from multiple angles. It was also reported by NPR, Minnesota Public Radio, as well as the LA Times. It started when Alondra, a 16-year-old high school student, and her friend went to pick up a prescription for her grandma after school. She was turning into a parking lot when another car stopped in front of her, forcing her to stop. Four men got out of the car wearing ski masks, holding guns and displaying no ID. She got scared, put the car in reverse, and then another car struck her from behind. She gave them her license and passport, showing she was a U.S. citizen. This should have been the end of the interaction. ICE has no authority to detain U.S. citizens. Instead, they put her in handcuffs in the back of their car. When nearby observers peacefully protested because what ICE was doing was clearly illegal, ICE pepper sprayed and tear gassed the crowd. Then they took her to a federal building, refused to let her contact her parents, another crime, shackled her feet, and stuck her in a cell alone for hours. Late that night, she was let go and she could finally call her aunt to pick her up. They made no effort to return her to where she was picked up or tell her where her car was. She asked where her car was and no one could answer. As of the writing of the LA Times article, she still hadn't found her car. I need to reiterate this story. An American child went on an after-school errand for her grandma and was arrested and kept from her parents for her, quote, perceived ethnicity, end quote. This is disgusting and it needs to stop. On a brighter note, if you'd like to help, my family has two recommendations. Get to know your neighbors. In general, this is always good advice. If Minnesotans have taught us anything these last few weeks, it's the power of community. Having a strong community makes you resilient, not just to an overreaching government, but also in natural disasters or even personal emergencies. Knowing your neighbors is also associated with better mental and physical health, even in stable times. Allison Rempel-Brown, the president of the Science Museum of Minnesota, shared a similar sentiment. Quote, I'm especially proud of our own team's response to this crisis. Staff members are sharing resources, checking in on one another, and offering help where it's needed. Continuing, science teaches us about interconnection, how ecosystems depend on biodiversity, how systems break down when elements are removed, and how resilience comes from diversity and adaptation. Our communities are no different. We are more resilient when we stand with our neighbors than when we turn away from them. We are more true to our values when we act with courage and compassion, even when it's difficult." Personally, if you want to help, you can go to standwithminnesota.com. They have an incredible list of crowdfunding campaigns, organizations doing work on the ground, and groups providing legal support that you can donate to. If you'd rather help with action than money, they have a section called Take Action that includes a ton of great things you can do. From the obvious, like contacting your representatives, writing letters to the editor, and boycotting certain businesses, to some less obvious actions like reading news sources based in Minnesota, reading books recommended by a Minnesotan librarian, starting conversations to correct disinformation, and perhaps my favorite, sending a love note, quote, of hope, inspiration, or gratitude to folks working their butts off on the ground, end quote. I have heard so many hopeful stories from people helping each other. Minnesotans are delivering food to those afraid to leave their homes. Minnesotans are setting off car alarms and blowing whistles to alert their neighbors of danger. Lawyers are working tirelessly to help get people out of unlawful detention. Minnesotans are providing each other with medical care in the street when ambulances can't make it or are intentionally kept away. Towing companies are helping to take care of people's cars who are swept up off the street. And Minnesotans are helping to pay each other's rent if they cannot make it to work or can't access their bank. The communities are really rising to the task and it is truly inspirational. Again, if you want to help, the website is standwithminnesota.com. And now back to the regularly recorded episode. Not of the animal itself. There's no body fossils. In these cases. There are some rare instances where something gets fossilized in its tracks. Oh, those are the best. But I don't know if there's been one of a dinosaur yet. I don't think so. I can only think of invertebrates. We talk a lot about echnology, which is the study of these types of fossils, and that includes tracks, burrows, nests, coprolites, fossilized poop, in our mini-series, which starts with episode 475 titled Dino Trace Fossils Part 1 Exploring Paleo Footprints, if you want to check that out. But as a recap, we have 10 items to talk about here, mostly footprints. And footprints are made by a living animal, so we can learn a bit about their behavior, at least their behavior in that moment that they made the footprint. And these trackways preserve fossilized behavior. They can tell us the speed the animal moved, or maybe they can suggest that these animals were living in herds. Drones have made it easier to study dinosaur tracks and marks because they're often in hard to access sites. It's also nice to be able to use photogrammetry to capture them. And for really large areas, it can be a pretty tedious and time consuming to take a ton of pictures, but you can program a drone to take a thousand or 10,000 photos with some changing of batteries perhaps and get it done in basically a day. Whereas you might not be able to get that done on foot or on cliff as the case may be. But before we get it to it, this seems like a good time to fulfill a listener request from Kessler, who a long time ago said that when we have a segment about regions that would otherwise be viable for dinosaur fossils, but don't have them to call it why no dino like y-w-h-y and then no as in there are no dinosaurs followed by a drunk history-esque version of your show wine-io dino in that case is wine wine oh yes wine like what you drink so for kessler i'm sticking out my tongue here why no dino but i think if we did a drunk history version that would be too annoying of an episode. Maybe we could do that as like premium content at some point. Oh gosh. I did bring this up now because in a lot of these cases, there's evidence of dinosaurs in the form of footprints and other traces they left behind, but just not necessarily any body fossils. So in a sense, where are they? And that's a good question. In a lot of cases, it could just be how things got preserved. Yeah. A lot of times there's a difference between the sort of chemistry that you want for preserving something like a fossil bone versus an eggshell versus a footprint. Preserving those different things can happen better or worse depending on the environment. Yeah. So I want to start here with the largest dinosaur track site ever found. This is pretty cool. It's in Bolivia. There are almost 18,000 theropod dinosaur tracks that show evidence of Running, Sauntering, and Swimming. Sauntering? Yeah. This was published by Raul Esperante and others in PLOS One, and it's open access. If you want to check it out, we'll have a link in our show notes. So it's from 70 million years ago at the late Cretaceous. It includes 16,603 towed tracks across over 1,300 trackways. 1,321 if you want to know the exact number. and there's 289 isolated prints and 1,378 swim tracks across 280 trackways. And these are all tracks from theropods. Holy cow, that is a lot. This isn't the one that's like on a cliff face, is it, in Bolivia that we've talked about before? This is a new one? This is not a new one. The track site was first found in 1947 in the El Molino Formation in Bolivia. and more and more tracks have been found since then. They include titanosaurs and theropods and more. There's one track site that's the one you're thinking of, Garrett, the Cal Orcos, which is famous because it's nearly vertical. Mm-hmm. And that's part of this whole set? I believe so. So there's also claw marks and indentations, tail marks and scratches from feet scraping the lake bed as the dinosaurs swam, and avian tracks and invertebrate burrows. So there's a lot going on here. and this site has the highest number of theropod tracks and highest number of swim tracks. It's really well preserved, this particular area, not the Cal Orco, this other one that's been described. It used to be a shoreline of an ancient, shallow freshwater lake, so there was a lot of mud that helps. Most of the footprints are from small to medium-sized theropods and the footprints range in size. They're almost 12 inches or 30 centimeters long to less than 4 inches or 10 centimeters. There's 11 different types of tracks. There's small and miniature tracks found alongside larger tracks. The tracks that are under 20 centimeters or under 8 inches are often from juveniles or small species. They about 6 1 to 13 feet or 2 to 4 meters long Then there tracks that are 20 to 40 centimeters or 8 inches to over 15 inches long They from mid theropods that are about 16 feet to 33 feet or 5 to 10 meters long And then the tracks that are over 40 centimeters are from large theropods that are over 33 feet or 10 meters long. The tracks go in two main directions, so the dinosaurs probably walked back and forth along the lakeshore. and in some cases you could tell that the dinosaur made sharp turns as it ran along the water. There's also a lot of tail drag traces with the footprints, so it seems that the theropods moved in a way on the mud. It sunk into soft substrate that led to their tails contacting the surface. Interesting. Yeah. It seems like that would be pretty deep mud if your tail is dragging. I guess it depends on how much your tail dips down from above your legs. Yeah, or maybe it just made them move in a way that they had to lower their tails or something. Oh yeah, like that sort of leaning back slightly. Yeah. So this site is the Carreras Pampa. There's also a lot of swim tracks, which form continuous swim trackways. And they show that they nearly floated and swam while kicking the soft bottom with the tips of their toes. The way the tracks are lined up show that they were swimming slightly parallel to the shore. It's unclear why. Like I mentioned before, the dinosaur bones and eggs, things like that, are scarce here. But a large number of trackways suggest that there was a lot of traffic and gregarious behavior. No ornithopod or sauropod tracks were found, so there's no evidence for pursuing prey kind of behavior here. But it seems that one or more groups of dinosaurs moved together. Maybe there were swimming laps. They were exercising, that's why it's parallel to the shore. Yeah. And get the optimal amount of swimming in. Yes. I mean, the Olympics, I mean, the Winter Olympics are coming up, but it reminded me of this video we made years ago when the Chrome T-Rex running game made an Olympics version and there was the T-Rex swimming. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like the 404 or the page didn't load thing. Yeah. The web browser Chrome. Yeah. I forgot that there was all those different versions of it. I remember the hurdles one. I couldn't remember the other ones. The swimming one was pretty, and they were all pretty cute. Anyway, there was an earlier study of this same site, the Carreras Pampa site, that also found that the theropod's feet sunk in the mud. This was published by J.A. McLarty and others in historical biology. And it was a statistical analysis that came out a year before, November of 2024, where they analyzed 10 trackways and associated tail traces. and dinosaurs that left those tracks were similar in size. They estimated a height at the hip of one to one and a half meters or 3.6 to 4.9 feet. And they estimated a walking speed of 4.1 to 8.8 kilometers per hour, two and a half to five and a half miles per hour. It was like a walk to a slow jog for a human. But there's a lot of deep tracks. So their feet sunk into the substrate, which led to those tail traces. So there you go, Garrett. That's why we got the tail. It was deep mud. But like you said, it could also be their posture. It doesn't necessarily have to be that they were sunk into their knee so that the tail was touching the whole length. It could just be the tip of the tail because of the posture. It's impressive that they were able to walk that fast in that deep of mud. Interesting. Maybe the tail was helping a little bit somehow. Sometimes I think these discoveries invite more questions once you have some answers. Yeah, I can't imagine keeping up that. I guess it's sort of like running in wet sand where you sink in a little bit more, but you can keep up a decent pace if you're putting in enough effort. That's hard. It's hard work. Maybe the reason they were parallel in the water was it was a little easier to walk in water, take a break. Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking avoiding an obstacle like there was some rocks in the way or there were a bunch of other animals or who knows what on the shore. I didn't think about the terrain of the shore being actually more difficult than swimming. Could be. could be. So we were talking about how that's, I mean, that's fairly fast if it's your feet are sinking into mud. But this next study tells us, well, a bit about medium-sized theropod behaviors and how one set of footprints shows the fastest running theropod trackway from the Cretaceous. This was published by Yang Li and others in Science China Earth Sciences. And the tracks are from about 130 to 120 million years ago. It was founded in Inner Mongolia. There's four trackways and two isolated footprints and one trackways from a medium-sized theropod. There's five consecutive footprints. They estimate the theropod to be about almost nine feet, a little over 2.6 meters long and weigh about 240 pounds or 109 kilograms. And it was running. Oh, cool. Yeah. They think it was moving at 28 miles per hour, 45 kilometers per hour, which is likely reaching its max speed. And it's similar in speed to a professional cyclist. Yes, but that's not the maximum speed of a professional cyclist. That's similar in speed to also like a professional sprinter. That's very fast for a human to go, for sure. Yes. Well, I'm saying likely the max speed of the dinosaur. Not the max speed of a professional cyclist. Yes. Gotcha. So to figure out how fast the dinosaur moved, you have to figure out how large the dinosaur was based on its footprint size and how large its strides were. and then you divide the stride length by its hip height to get its relative stride length. So this dinosaur ran in a straight line and it has deep toe impressions. Only two of the prints show shallow heel impressions. And that's why they think it was likely sprinting because it's running on the tiptoe. This helps support the hypotheses from previous research and studies, mainly on biomechanics, which analyzes movement, that medium theropods could run fast. Yeah, it is a medium theropod. It sounds small when you say it's about nine feet long and weighed about 240 pounds. But for an animal that's going 28 miles an hour, that's pretty fast. It is. That's a lot of energy. Good thing the mud wasn't too deep. Yeah. Well, was it in mud at all? I don't know. I presume it wasn't too muddy to keep up that intensive a speed. There's something, some kind of substrate there that was able to fossilize. Yeah, that's true. So it had to sink in a little bit, which is still a lot of speed to keep up with that going on. There's another trackway that showed theropods moving at a slower pace. This was published by Anthony Remiglio and Lita Shing in Geosciences in Open Access. And they re-examined the longest known theropod trackway in China. It's from the early Cretaceous. The trackway is about 70 meters or almost 230 feet long. So that's the longest known theropod trackway in China. and it's near Hanshi village in Sichuan province. It's known as Shifenguo or the stone phoenix nests. The tracks were once imagined by villagers to be left by a phoenix. It was mentioned in a poem from the late Qing dynasty around 1840 to 1911, give or take. That's the Qing dynasty like? Yeah. That's cool. I love those details about early interpretations of dinosaur fossils. Yeah. I like the idea of stone phoenixes. So the Theropod trackway was mapped in 2015, and they used new digital techniques to reanalyze it. They studied 81 footprints. They think it was possibly made by Euteranus. Ooh, even cooler. Yeah, and it was in this bent-legged stance. They confirmed the tracks were made at a consistent pace, a medium speed of 5.3 kilometers per hour or 3.3 miles per hour. So it mostly walked. Yeah. I mean, that would definitely be walking pace for something the size of a Euteranus. That was about, it was kind of on the slower end of what you were saying for those dinosaurs walking in mud. Yeah. Well, it's a bigger dinosaur if it's Euteranus. That's true. Now I'm sticking with our theropods, but we're moving to other types of traces. Dinosaur Ridge, Colorado has the largest known dinosaur mating dance arena. Oh yeah. I think we've talked about that before with the lecking marks. We have not talked about this specific site. Okay. So this was published by Rogers Bunton and others in Cretaceous Research. Dinosaur bones have been found in Dinosaur Ridge since the late 1800s during the Bone Wars. And for this study, they looked at an area at the base of the ridge that used to flood periodically. It was a tidal flat. There's similar spots that have been used by birds for mating dances. This spot's from about 100 million years ago, and they use drone imagery. The footage is from 2019 and 2024. People are not allowed to walk in that area to prevent destroying historical evidence. And that includes scientists. So nobody's allowed in that area. Oh, that's true. That's another advantage to using drones that we didn't mention. You can take pictures of it without accidentally stepping on something important. Yeah. So these scrape marks on the slope were found in 2023. They saw 35 scrape marks of different shapes and sizes and 18 of the scrapes overlap. and they just were able to find footage from 2019 years before they recognized what it was and compare. It looks similar to other lecking sites found in Colorado and Alberta, Canada. And the lecking site is for mating dances and courtship displays. Only three other dinosaur lecking sites have been found, which is why it's so exciting. There's evidence of two types of marks. There's a bowl-like one and long and thin marks, which could show display and nest building. There's some prior digging at some of the dancing spots. There's marks in different strata. So it seems that different dinosaurs use the site at different times. Yeah, like when you were saying some of them overlapped, that's almost certainly got to be at different times. Yeah. And the different marks show different dancing styles, like dragging a claw. Some marks were found that it was kicking its feet backwards one at a time. There's others from the animal rotating and scraping claws on the ground, and they made a counterclockwise or clockwise turn. In Discover Magazine, Bunton said, quote, it's kind of like the moonwalk with a little spin. And there were footprints found nearby that may mean the marks were made by ornithomimids, fast-running bird mimics. You can kind of visit the site. You can't step on it, but you can walk up to it from a trail. Next up, we have potential evidence of multiple dinosaur species walking together. This is from Phil Bell and others in PLOS One, also open access. Tracks from 76 million years ago may show that Ceratopsians and Ankylosaurs hung out together. There's many made by Ceratopsians. There's 13 Ceratopsian tracks. There's at least five individuals walking together, possibly Styracosaurus or Chasmosaurus. And then there's another set of footprints from an Ankylosaurid and two large Tyrannosaur trackways, three tracks walking side by side, perpendicular to this herd. So maybe it was stalking the group or maybe they made their tracks at a different time. That is always the most simple explanation is just, well, this dirt slash sand slash mud was good at preserving footprints. So everything that walked by it for any reason happened to get preserved. Not that it was all part of the same exact moment. Yeah. But it's fun to think about it. Stocking. Yeah. And it's cool to see at the very least you can tell that those different types of animals all lived in that area at the same time. Yeah. Whether or not they were directly interacting at that moment. Oh, and there's also a small theropod track. The footprints were found in 2024 at Dinosaur Provincial Park, and the track site is known as the Skyline Track Site. The Ceratopsians are suspected to have lived in herds because there's bone beds too, but bone beds only tell you if they died together or their carcasses accumulated together. These tracks, though, they show regular spacing and they're walking parallel. It could mean that there was some mixed species herding behavior, like how modern wildebeest and zebras travel together. You've got Sarah and, oh, not Spike. That would be Rooter. Yeah. Traveling together. And if they were traveling together, they could work together as a defense strategy, help each other be on the lookout for predators. That's true. I could imagine trying to like come up with some sort of how a Ceratopsian's horns and an Ankylosaurus club could work together in some sort of defensive formation, but that seems really speculative. Yeah. It would probably just be strength in numbers that having more of any animal together. And there's a good chance that ankylosaurs and ceratopsians ate different things. So it makes some sense that they could hang out together and be better at defending themselves and each other while not taking each other's food too much. Mm-hmm. Next up, we get into the sauropod tracks. So, paleontologists have found a set of sauropod tracks that show that it made a loop. This was published in Geomatics by Anthony Remiglio and others. It was found in Bluff Sandstone in Colorado at the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Track Site. It's from the late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago. There are over 130 footprints along a 95.5 meter long track, or 313 feet. It's funny because it's like, this is an all or nothing sort of thing. We've got one with like eight tracks, one with 13 tracks, and then we've got thousands. And then, you know, this is hundreds of feet. We don't have any of these like in between. There aren't any like, oh, there's 50 tracks for like 30 feet. Oh, they probably are, but we're just not talking about them today. These are really impressive when you have a trackway that long, 300 feet. Yeah. That is a lot of tracks. You can actually make some good inferences there. Whereas with the previous one where you're talking like parallel and perpendicular, but you've got two tracks of one and three tracks of the other, there's a little bit more hand-waving going on than with this study. What's cool about this one is it's a complete loop. It also shows a dinosaur that may have been limping. So this area was on privately owned land, but acquired by the U.S. Forest Service in 2024. And locals had known about the site since the 1950s. They used drones to take photos and make a 3D model. They took 925 images. The footprints had been found and reported on back in 2021. So they re-examined the tracks. They found 131 consecutive footprints of a relatively small sauropod that was consistently walking. The left and right footprints shifted from narrow to wide, which shows it can change naturally as the dinosaur moves. So short trackways where the width seems consistent may be misleading in terms of the animal's walking style. Like you were saying, having more tracks is better. Yeah, and we've seen that I think at least in one other track site because for a long time there was this thing about they're the wide gauge track makers and the narrow gauge. And then they found some of these where they're changing and it's like, oh, that's just wide stance versus narrow stance of the same animal potentially. They also saw a difference in the left and right step lengths, which may show it was limping, but it's so hard to say. In other sauropod track news, in Oxfordshire, England, scientists found multiple trackways from mostly sauropods walking at a steady pace. It's at Dewar's Farm Quarry. It's from the middle Jurassic, about 166 million years ago, and there's over 200 footprints. Another big one. Yeah, there's five trackways. The longest one is over 150 meters or about 492 feet. Jeez. And there's four trackways from sauropods, possibly Cediosaurus, the whale lizard, because that's been found in the area. And then the fifth trackway, they say, was made by Megalosaurus, which I couldn't figure out how they knew Megalosaurus specifically. but maybe it was the only one in terms of like that matched the shape or the size of the footprint. I feel like there is a footprint that's like Megalosaurus or something that's frequently attributed to Megalosaurus, but at the very least, it's probably just a theropod around the right size from the right time and place. Yeah. So these were excavated in June 2024 over a period of one week after a quarry worker felt some unusual bumps while driving. And then they had a team of over 100 people working on it. They built 3D models of the site using drone photography. A lot of drone photos coming up here. And they took more than 20,000 images. Nice. That's the first time I remember hearing about footprints being discovered while driving. But I sometimes describe sauropod footprints as being like potholes. Yeah, so you would notice. It kind of fits. There's a lot of individual footprints that have been found in the UK. So it's exciting to see trackways now when they're together, and they're really well preserved. You can tell the dinosaur squelched the mud forward. The area back then was like a lagoon. Yeah, you get those little pile-ups sometimes in footprints. Yeah. And the sauropods estimated to walk about two meters per second, about four and a half miles per hour. The footprints are evenly spaced, so it walked at a steady pace. One footprint is out of place, so it seems that the dinosaur stopped and leaned on one leg. maybe it slipped or maybe it heard something and stopped to check if it was safe. We know it took a short pause and then kept walking. And there's future studies to come, they said. I like the idea of scientists spending like hundreds of hours trying to figure out why the sauropod paused. Yeah. Like maybe it just sneezed or something. Yeah, we don't think of dinosaurs sneezing too often. Now I need to look up if birds can sneeze. Well, I was thinking of Dolly, the sauropod that we know had the respiratory infection. Next up, some theropod footprints were found in a crisscross pattern in Texas in the U.S. It was found in August of 2025. There were some really terrible, devastating floods in Texas. The silver lining is that water washed away a lot of dirt and gravel and uncovered dinosaur tracks. These are about 115 to 110 million years old. So in the middle-ish of the Cretaceous, a little bit before the midpoint? Yeah, there's 15 large theropod footprints that are in a crisscross pattern. And each footprint is about 18 to 20 inches long or almost 46 centimeters to 51 centimeters. There's no studies of this yet as of this recording, but it sounds like there's a lot to learn. Yeah, that's cool. That is one of those interesting things with huge floods and storms and everything. They can cause a lot of destruction, but sometimes that destruction includes eroding away a lot of dirt. and sometimes or cliff faces or various things that expose new rock, which can have dinosaurs or dinosaur footprints in them. Yes. I do know it was a very sad event, though. There were a lot of deaths. Yes. In another part of the world, there were thousands of prosauropod footprints from the Triassic found in a national park in Italy. This was discovered last September. A photographer spotted them on a vertical mountain wall. So we got another vertical wall here. The wall was a tidal flat. It's from the Triassic about 210 million years ago, and it was found in northern Italy in Stelvio National Park. Some footprints are up to 15 inches or 40 centimeters in diameter, and they're in parallel rows, and many have traces of toes and claws. So they're probably from prosauropods. You think long necks, small heads, sharp claws, and they're herbivores that are up to 33 feet or 10 meters long. They walked on two legs, but in some cases there are handprints in front of the footprints, so it's likely they stopped and rested on all fours. Yeah, and they might have walked-ish on all fours sometimes too, depending on the terrain and things where they were eating. There's traces of groups of animals gathering in a circle, maybe for defense. The area is really remote, so they're going to need drones to help with further studies. So that wraps up our trace fossils segment, mostly tracks, which I think, again, ties in nicely with our interview with David because figuring out dinosaur tracks and their behavior is a lot like a puzzle. And escape rooms, of course, are also puzzles. Yes. And we'll get to that interview right after we thank some sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Colorado Northwestern Community College, also known as CNCC Join them for two weeks digging up bones working in a lab or learning field geology this summer Of course of those the most exciting sounding might be digging up bones in the field. I don't know. Preparing fossils in a lab, you can learn a lot. You can, but I want to talk about the digging up fossils part this time. Fair enough. If you saw our newsletter last week, You might have seen the image from Colorado Northwestern Community College, their summer paleo adventures as it's labeled. And in the picture, you can see them putting a jacket on a semi-articulated femur and tibia and some other unknown element. That one's still a little bit covered in rock, so it'll wait till it gets to the lab to get fully excavated where they'll see the rest of the bone. But it is all dinosaur material, and it's so exciting that they got that all out of the ground. Oh, yeah. It's not too surprising. They're digging in the Morrison Formation, which is a great formation for dinosaur bones. Yeah, there's a lot of that in Northwest Colorado. If you do go into the field with them, you'll get to work alongside paleontologists. You'll help advance science and contribute to new potential discoveries, like that dinosaur leg we're mentioning. And you'll also be camping and doing some rigorous physical activities so you get some bonus workouts in the mix, too. There we go. it's not a guarantee that you'll be working on dinos because you never quite know what you're going to find in the ground it's part of the fun it is but no matter what you'll be using the same skills and tools and processes to get those fossils up out of the ground if you'd like to go on one of these dinosaur or other fossil digs there are two field sessions this summer one of them is from july 5th to the 18th and the other is from july 21st to august 3rd and at the same time, there are also lab sessions if you're more interested in that. If you want more details or you want to sign up, head over to cncc.edu slash paleo26. That's cncc.edu slash paleo26. And now on to our interview with David Spira. But first, as always, we have an extended version of this interview. And maybe even more so with this interview than other recent interviews, we talked for quite a while and we went down a lot of interesting nerd rabbit holes so if you want to hear more of our discussion with him then check out the extended version of this interview on Patreon we are joined this week by David Spira he's the co-creator of roomescapeartist.com which publishes well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous escape room reviews design tips, player tips and industry commentary thank you so much for joining us Thank you for having me. And I have to tell you, the two of you are just like living my inner 10-year-old's dream. Our inner 10-year-old's dreams too. Yes. Thank you. But it sounds like you and your wife are also living out your own dreams. We really are. Yeah. We started Room Escape Artist 11 years ago, which is crazy. And we have been writing daily content since like 2016. We started in 2014 and we have been writing daily content since 2016. We have a growing team of people writing, producing escape room tours, producing a convention, producing a few podcasts. The whole thing kind of grew out of control during the pandemic. We recruited a whole bunch of really brilliant, wonderful, talented people and just started making stuff with them. Nice. Amazing. So our listeners now might be wondering, why are we talking about escape rooms on this dinosaur podcast? But turns out there are dinosaur and paleo and science themed escape rooms. Yeah, there are a handful of really interesting dinosaur escape rooms. There's also a handful that I'm going to warn you dino fans away from. That's good to know. Yeah. So what are some of maybe the top ones? So the top one by far is at least a little bit of a trip for us in North America, but is a game called Jurassico from a company named Golden Pop, and they are in Barcelona, Spain. And Jurassico in 2024 was ranked number 51 in the world in terms of in the global escape room rankings. which is a award called Terpica, the top escape room project, enthusiast choice awards. I'm on the board. I didn't choose the name, but it's a incredibly elaborate voting system for experienced escape room players. And it's a big community project. And so, yeah, this was the 51st game on that list, which is it's a competitive list. How many escape do you have like a rough approximation of how many escape rooms there are? globally honestly i can't even tell you how many i can tell you that just for this award in 2024 1042 games were nominated and those are just like really good games some of them aren't but mostly they're really great games that are getting nominated but even within the u.s we have about 2 000 escape room facilities if you figure an average of three games per company which is pretty reasonable, you're still talking just about 6,000 games in the United States alone. And this is very much a global movement. So breaking the top 100 is like the tippy top of the top 1% of best. Yeah. And so I have not had the opportunity to play this game personally, but one of our writers, Matthew Stein did. And so we have a review of it and it is a crazy thing. I've also talked to quite a few people about it. It looks like Jurassic Park. Nice. Even they have like the gates and everything. Oh, yes. That does look like Jurassic Park. Yeah. Similar font, that gate. It says Jurassic Ho if you look closely. Yes. So this game, as I understand it, they have built like climates into there. It gets wet. They have brought in dirt, like actual dirt from the outside world, which is a first. I have seen lots of sand in games. I have never seen anything quite like this. And this is a game where people warn you, like, don't wear nice shoes, don't wear nice clothes, because you will be getting real dirty in this game. That sounds intense. It's really, this is an intense one. Spain in general is known for their intense escape rooms. they build a lot of on the high end in the spanish market they build a lot of physically intense and also emotionally intense games i'm looking at the other picture or one of the other pictures is a guy in a poncho so yes so yeah i was really sad i didn't get a chance to play this we were staying a block away from it but we could not get a booking when we were in barcelona so So it's a popular one. If you are going to try and book this, book the game well in advance because the popular globally, the top escape rooms can book out very far in advance. So do be careful with that. If you're thinking about going to Spain, you're a dinosaur fan, you're thinking, oh, I might want to do this, book this game immediately. Nice. I bet you could build a whole trip around this. like the escape room and then also hit up a museum or two and maybe there's dig sites i can't remember off the top of my head about barcelona and dig sites yeah nearby right oh yeah yeah yeah in eastern spain certainly there's a lot of dinosaur dig sites the cool thing i'd like at the top of the review is you have like the key details about it not just the obvious stuff like how long it takes and how many people can play it. But you have the mess meter, which is a five out of five. Is that on everyone or was that added just because this is so messy? I'm so glad that you keyed in on that. This is something that we literally only added for Spain. It started with us kind of trolling the Spanish escape room companies because so many of them, we walked out looking like we had done demolition work because they really were filthy. And so we did a whole series of reviews and added in the mess meter. And then when Matthew went, he also incorporated this. It's sort of become a meme that we do, but only in Spain. Oh, I see. That is hilarious. The other one I wanted to point out is there's one called Physical Restraints, and you gave it an A plus for no physical restraints. Is that because some escape rooms, they like tie you up? So this was very common, particularly in the early days of escape rooms before fire code was being readily enforced. There would be a lot of physical restraints in games. And so we took it upon ourselves as kind of leaders within our community to go and come up with our own basic safety assessments. which were largely built around, can I free myself from this game in the event of an emergency? Not following any official code or anything like that, but that was something that we have found important. And so we started incorporating that in 2019. And that is in all of our reviews. So we do our best to assess this stuff. Nice. Yeah. Because that certainly, I mean, escape rooms can be in all sorts of different environments And they're not always in places where there's modern sprinkler systems and things like that. Yeah. And as you travel globally, you know, you see all sorts of different norms. And so in the United States and in Canada, you will not find a lot of like hazards in escape rooms. Like it's incredibly rare to find a real meaningful hazard in an escape room in North America. That's not the case. If you go particularly to Athens, Greece, where there's some amazing games, there are also some very risky games. And also in Barcelona and Spain in general, like they're just a lot more physical. There's a lot more climbing, a lot more crawling, a lot more physical engagement. Like I wear knee pads when I travel. I have pants that have built-in knee pads that I wear when I travel abroad to play escape rooms because we end up playing a lot of games in a row. and I just want to take care of my knees while I'm doing it. Nice. That's good. It's important. That's a sign of our age. I think that also works if you're going on a dig. It does. Yeah, you can wear the same pants if you're around the field. And this is sort of like when I started talking with you both, kind of realized that there was some good overlap between dinosaur fans and escape room fans because there's a lot of travel opportunities. You kind of have to go to the places. And also, I think lots of people who like to keep their minds busy. Yeah. And you have, I was going to say a museum map because that's what we call ours, the dinosaur museum map. But you have a map of escape rooms around the world too on your site. We have a map of all of the locations in the United States. We don't have the global map because it's just too much data for us to manage. But there are some really wonderful apps. There's Morty, which is a iPhone and Android app that you can download to help find good escape rooms. And then our website has recommendation guides for all sorts of different regions. So anywhere you want to go, we have a guide probably for it. And we break that down based off of all sorts of different factors. What's your favorite escape room where you had a really good time? My favorite game right now is not shocking to escape room fans. It's a game called Magnifico Circus. It is at a company called Escape Arium in Laval, Quebec, Canada, just outside of Montreal. And it is currently the top ranked game in the world. It is two and a half hours. It has three actors in it. It is beautiful and it will make you cry and not because someone assaulted you. It will make you cry because it is beautiful. It is so moving and fun and magical. And it's just, it's an incredible creation. And I have just so much admiration for it and the people who made it. That's cool. Of note, Escapearium, that makes Magnifico, one of their other games, it's at a different location, but it's like 15 minutes away. They have a game called Tyranno Industries, which is sort of their take on Jurassic Park. It's one of their older games at this point. This was the first time that they attempted to make something really big and really ambitious. And so it has a whole bunch of dinosaur animatronics in it. It's got a classic dinosaur poop puzzle. Wait, what does that mean? Classic? Like digging in dinosaur poop, I assume? Almost every dinosaur game that you'll find has some kind of puzzle that is involving analyzing dinosaur poop. Okay. It's sort of a recurring trope in dinosaur escape room games. I wonder how that started. Oh, it's absolutely from the Triceratops scene in Jurassic Park. Oh, that makes sense. That's what I figured. Escape room creators are always trying to create cinematic reality. Have they ever approached the scale of the Jurassic Park poop? I have not seen it. That doesn't mean it hasn't been attempted. But I do think people should dream bigger with their dinosaur poop. So was this one maybe the best in North America? It is certainly up there. There's probably three of them in North America that I would recommend, and this is one of the three. So I think it's certainly worth checking out. What are the other two? Yeah, obvious. The other two. So you have a company called 62 Escape in Schaumburg, and they have a game called Jurassic Outpost. And this is a game where you are being sent to an island to retrieve samples on behalf of a company that may or may not be up to no good. And it looks very Jurassic Park. It feels very Jurassic Park. And it's just got wonderful, beautiful dinosaur-themed puzzles. I had a blast playing this. It's good. It's puzzly. It's dinosaur-y. And yeah, highly recommend this company. Highly recommend this game. And then the last one that I will recommend to you is from a company called Captured LV in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is about a 90-minute drive from the Edelman Fossil Park. Nice. They have a game called The Island, and it's kind of a regional standout. And it is sort of a merger of like Tiki Island and Jurassic Park. It's real cute. It's real creative. And again, also has like solid puzzles. So those are my three favorite North American dinosaur games for you. I heard Tiki and dinosaurs, and it made me think of that's what Nedry would have wanted. I think you're kind of right. Yeah, this is definitely. Oh, another thing that like dinosaur Jurassic Park fans will find is a lot of dinosaur games, not all of them, but a lot of them will have the Barbasol can. Like as a part of it or is it just kind of an Easter egg? So if you go onto Amazon and just search Barbasol can safe, you can go and buy yourself a Barbasol can with a bottom that screws out and inside has space to hide something. That's perfect for escape rooms. Perfect for escape rooms. Perfect for dinosaur escape rooms. Kind of a good stocking stuffer for your dinosaur fan. And it's what every escape room featuring Jurassic Park has to have, I guess. It's not in some of the newer ones, but it's certainly in a lot of the older ones. And yeah, it's just kind of a classic prop and can literally buy it for $13. It will have some shaving cream in the top. So they will drain the shaving cream before they put it in an escape room. But you can literally just throw this into a medicine cabinet and it looks like shaving cream. In real life, I feel like it's maybe the worst possible place to hide something because so many people would see that and be like, oh, something's in the net. I fully agree with that. But also, it's just cool. It is. Yeah. So you said you don't see these in the newer ones. first of all, are there even enough dinosaur escape rooms to see a trend? But if there are, like, yeah, what sort of trends do you see? I mean, this is a trend for escape rooms in general, which is like the earlier ones, the less elaborate ones are very focused on puzzles and locks and hiding things. The more modern games, the more ambitious games tend to do very little of hiding things. They tend to have very few locks and the puzzles are more about telling a story, making you feel a story. And so that is what escape rooms have been shifting towards is becoming these like full on adventures where you really do lose yourself in them. And so the earlier ones are a lot more puzzly, a lot more like searching for stuff. The modern ones are a lot more like the puzzles are there, but they're conveying something. They're making you take game actions that are advancing the plot. That's what really sets apart the high-end games is that they are making you into characters into a proper adventure. Gotcha. So you kind of, it's more obvious what you need to do, but you feel like compelled to do it. And it's interesting rather than like, is it under the clock? Is it under the mat on the desk? Is it under that book? Yeah, it's a lot more about forward momentum and about keeping things moving in a narrative way. And as I describe it, it's about story feeling rather than storytelling. So like you're not being told a story so much as you are feeling it by living it. That's fancy. That is. Sounds complicated and hard to pull off. It's hard to pull off, but when you do, it's magical. And one of the things that's really cool about it is when you pull it off, the hinting is baked in. It becomes invisible. you just feel just this constant momentum forward. And it's just really cool. It's so much fun to get lost in them. Does that mean the newer or the more recent ones have more live actors in them? Depends on where you go. But yeah, I would say humans are really cool technology. And people are exploring human-powered interactions a lot more. Cool. It makes me a little scared to do a Jurassic Park like realistic. You feel like you're getting lost in the world. We all know how it turned out. Yeah, I've never watched Jurassic Park and thought like, yeah, I want to go there. I want to experience that. Look, if you stop before the storm, it's just a really happy movie. And before Nedry like turns off all the electric fences. Yeah, yeah. Just stop before the weather turns bad and it's fine. Everything is fine. So then watch out for that one in Barcelona because you got a guy in a poncho. The weather's bad. The weather's bad. So what are some escape rooms you might want to stay away from if you know a lot about dinosaurs So there one in particular that I will caution people away from and it probably the most common one and that is Jurassic Escape at a company called Escape the Room. They're a chain. They have locations in a lot of different places, and the game can be fine. The issue is that I have found, and our community has found, that maintenance and care is just not prevalent at this company. So this would be kind of an old school game to begin with. The set doesn't look too bad. There's some things that like your audience would probably find charming if it works, but I can't recommend that you gamble on this company. I used to be a big fan and over the years, they have just kind of degraded in my eyes. it's like it has some cool animatronics or something but they just yeah they've built some stuff that can be cool if it works i would also say it's just kind of like a small scale also and it feels like there were some grander ambitions it honestly feels to me like they probably thought they were going to get the jurassic park license and then didn't get it is what i think may have happened i don't have that don't have direct knowledge of that but But that's the vibe I get. Gotcha. Mostly I like to shine a spotlight on things. I tend to prefer to not wave the red flag, but this one I'll wave the flag on. Are there any other dinosaur or paleo or science even themed escape rooms? That you like? That you like, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of really cool archaeology type games. There's a lot of like Indiana Jones-y type things. One of my personal favorites is from The Room in Berlin. The game is The Lost Treasure of Alexander von Humboldt. And it is so cool. It's sort of, it's very Indiana Jones-y. It's very Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade kind of vibes. And I know archaeology and paleontology are not the same thing, but I also know they're kind of cousins. They are, yes. They're overlapping interests. Yeah, I really enjoy that game quite a bit. But yeah, that's probably my number one archaeology-inspired game. But there's just no shortage of wonderful things out there. Just kind of check out that we have regional recommendations guides for so many different regions. And if you're looking for something specific, don't hesitate to reach out to Room Escape Artist. Hit us up on our contact page. We'll help you figure out what you should be playing. Nice. And you also offer tours. We do. We run escape room tours to destination cities all over the world. We bring groups of about 50 people, sometimes as many as 110, but we bring them in different sessions to all sorts of destinations and we schedule everything. We bring a wonderful group of lovely nerds to go off and have adventures together, play games and see some really cool things, meet some really cool creators. And yeah, we do all sorts of behind the scenes stuff. And it's just, it's a really good way to socialize and meet new people, meet really interesting people. I would say that's one of the real boons of the escape room community is that it is something that you kind of have to travel to go and do this. It's not like a movie. You can't stream it. You can't download the video game. You can't download the book. You've got to go to the place, which is sort of like all of the dig sites. You have to go out and do it if you want to go do it. And so there is this really cool communal experience that has come out of that. And there's just a lot of us from all over the world have gotten to know each other. We've traveled together. You meet, you play games, and I always like to pair the games with a nice meal. Nice. Yeah. Hearing you say that reminded me a lot of when we travel and whenever we're going somewhere new, we're like, do they have a dinosaur museum? Let's see if we can find like something dinosaur related there. I'm sure you do the same thing where like you just happen to be in a city and you're like, there's got to be an escape room here somewhere. I mean, we are so plugged in. We're constantly, we have a list of cities and places we're trying to get to. And we're very on top of like, we've got plans. Our plans have plans. it's uh one of the the challenges and one of the things that's fun and like for me personally i don't suffer from fomo which is helpful but i will never be able to play all of the games that i want to play i know that people are making new ones that are wonderful all the time and i have i only have so much time so much money and i also spend most of my free time most of my time writing about this stuff, podcasting about it, making events. And so I have a finite amount of time I can spend playing. So we really like to do our research and find things that we're really going to enjoy. And so we bias towards really amazing and really weird. That's what we tell people to flag us for. It's like, tell us about the really weird stuff. And even if it's like super flawed, like I'm fine with something that's flawed, but really interesting. Yeah. And then just something that's going to be incredible and make me feel feelings. Yep. I think we're on the same page there because that's also what we look for, I guess, in dinosaurs and science, all that stuff. It's the stuff that makes you think. And it's not just another rehash on the same thing. So there could be cool things, hypothetically, like an escape room where you are a dinosaur rather than you're just in Jurassic Park. Something more crazy like that would be great. it's funny that you say that because i it does not exist but i badly want a game to exist where the players are kaiju and the set is like a tiny city because you are so big i don't believe anyone has built this but i so badly want this to exist so if you want a high rating. Yeah. Yes. I mean, do it, but do it well. Yeah. Well, thank you. So for our listeners, where is the best place to find out more about you and your work and room escape artists, if they want to book tours or, you know, just find escape rooms? Well, first of all, thank you for having me and thank you for making such a fun show. I love listening to I Know Dino. Thank you. You can find all of our stuff at roomescapeartist.com. That's where you'll find our podcasts. We have Reality Escape Pod, where we interview creators of all sorts of immersive games from all over the world. We've had some really interesting guests on there. They're all really interesting. And we have PG's Playhouse, which is a puzzle and trivia show that we've had the both of you on for two episodes. Our dinosaur episode should be out now. and the Phylloxera episode will be coming out soon. Then yeah, if you want to look up about our tours, you can find all of that information on the website. Tours, events, meetups, conventions. It's all there. Awesome. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us today. Thank you so much for having me. I've had so much fun. Us too. Thanks again, David, for the fantastic interview. There is so much more to escape rooms than I knew, and it's so cool to hear about the variety of different paleo and anthropology and dinosaur escape rooms. And also just the storytelling aspect. Yeah, it's really cool. And in just a second, we'll get into our dinosaur of the day, Cegnosaurus. But first, we're going to thank a couple sponsors. It's that time of year where we mail out dino-it-all patches to all of our patrons at the Triceratops tier and above. And we have the patches in our possession. I'm holding one in my hand right now. Bahadosaurus sauropod. Yeah, our first sauropod. This is, I have to say, my favorite to touch out of all the patches because it has all of those individual spines running along its neck, stretching up far above the neck, just like on a margasaurus. Giving it a mohawk look. It does, yes. And then those are all raised, which is why it's so fun to feel. They're all embroidered above the sail portion, which is sort of a background behind the spines. And it just it feels really cool. You can actually feel the spines from both sides. I was noticing while feeling it earlier today. It's a real sensory patch. It is. Yeah. I think it looks pretty good, too, because we picked a yellow and maybe like a gold background color for it to give it a real dramatic because we figure that was a display structure on Bajadasaurus. So we wanted to pick a bright color. Sunshine. Yeah, or like a toucan. Some of those birds that have the big yellow cask on the top of their head. I think it works. So if you want to check out a picture of this patch, you can see it on patreon.com slash inodino. And of course, if you're a patron, make sure to update your address by the end of this month, February 2026, so that we know where to mail your patch. and if you want to join, again, just join at the Triceratops tier or above by the end of February because on February 28th, we're going to pull all our patrons at the Triceratops tier, all of the addresses, and we're going to start shipping them out in March. Yes. So again, make sure you join before the end of this month, February. And update those addresses. And that's at patreon.com slash inodino. and now on to our dinosaur of the day segnosaurus which was a request from paleo mike 716 via our patreon and discord so thank you it was a therizinosaurid that lived in the late cretaceous and what is now mongolia and japan and it was large it was estimated to be about 20 to 23 feet or six to seven meters long and weigh 1.4 short tons although a later estimate in 2020 found it to weigh 4.6 short tons the rare dinosaur that gets heavier yeah estimates usually they shrink over time. Yeah. So it walked on two legs and it had a small head, a beak, and a long slender neck, as well as robust arms and three fingers on each hand. And they had large claws on them. The fingers weren't that long, but they ended in the large claws. The arms were reprised 69% of the length of the limbs of Dynachyrus, 73% Therizinosaurus. Those are big limbs. They are. Cygnosaurus had four toes on each foot and it had splayed toes. The hips were adapted to support its large belly. It probably couldn't move very fast. Now, over the years, there was a lot of confusion as to how to classify this dinosaur. Was it a theropod? Was it a sauropod? In the beginning, Cygnosaurus was considered to be a missing link between theropods and sauropods. That's funny to think of therazinosaurus in that space. Yes. And from that 1979 paper, they said, quote, please note that its inclusion among the rakes of theropods is conditional. So they knew that there was going to be debate. Now it did have robust hips and the pelvis was shortened at the front. And we see this in bird-like theropods, but not most other theropods. Yeah, that's more of an ornithischian trait than a theropod trait. Yes. It had an epistopubic pelvis. The pubic bone was pointed backward toward the tail instead of forward. The foot bones looked similar to pro sauropod foot bones, though they were proportionally larger. And early on, therizinosaurus in general were considered to be amphibious because, come on, they were too bulky and slow for land. Where have we heard that before? And then later, they were considered to walk on all fours like a sauropod. And then later, the claws on the hands were considered to be used for defense or when they're young to help them climb trees in a way similar to sloths. Not so much these days. Yes. Now, later, therizinosaur discoveries helped scientists figure out the group. A 2012 study of brain cases found that therizinosaurus had good smell, hearing, and balance, which may have helped with foraging, evading predators, and just help them socially. They may have gotten these traits from their carnivorous ancestors. Their hand claws are not used for digging because therizinosaurus had feathers on the arms, so not great for digging. Maybe they could use their foot claws for digging. Therizinosaur embryos found in China were in nests with no adults nearby, so it seems that as hatchlings they were precocial, like they could move and feed themselves from birth. Scientists also found 17 egg clutches together in Mongolia considered to belong to therizinosaurus. Having multiple clutches together may mean that therizinosaurus nested together in colonies, as we see in some hadrosaurs, sauropods, and birds. Therizinosaurus are considered to be herbivores based on their delicate jaws, weak teeth, having beaks, having that large gut, and the small head. and they could extend their arms pretty far forward, which would have helped for reaching for plants. They could also move their jaws up and down to eat. Now, Cygnosaurus lived alongside other Therizinosaurus, Ehrlichosaurus, Enigmasaurus, and Deonicus, so they probably each had their own niches to fill. Cygnosaurus, the lower jaw, was downturned at the front. It had a low, long lower jawbone that was relatively robust compared to Ehrlichosaurus. The back part of the jaws had no teeth. The teeth were in the front two-thirds of it. It had the largest teeth of all known therizinosaur teeth, though. That's not saying too much, but something. And they were leaf-shaped, foliodont. They replaced teeth in waves from the back to the front of the jaws. It also had some features of its teeth that were similar to other tetanurin theropods, which in those animals were considered to be abnormalities from trauma, or the way the tooth was replaced, or genetic factors like split carinae or cutting edges on the teeth. but in Cygnosaurus, all the teeth had this feature, so it doesn't seem to be an abnormality. Interesting. So they had those double serration stripes on the teeth. Yeah. Also, the teeth are close together and some of the teeth had three cutting edges, triple carinae, the three ridges, which according to a 2016 study was, quote, otherwise unknown in Theropoda. Cygnosaurus had large denticles on its teeth and more ridges compared to other therizinosaurus, which may mean it processed food more. It may also mean Cygnosaurus had more specialized feeding strategies. Its teeth were better at shredding compared to other therizinosaur teeth. It's almost like a mammal having unique teeth that show you about how it ate. And the downturned lower jaws and beaks helped its jaws not have much stress and strain on them when eating. Cygnosaurus could eat tougher vegetation compared to Ehrlichosaurus, which relied more on its beak to crop food. This is according to a 2017 study. So that kind of explains how they were able to live alongside each other. Yeah, there's a lot of plants out there and most animals can't eat all of them. The type and only species is Cygnosaurus galbanensis. Multiple specimens have been found. They're well preserved but incomplete and they were found in 1974 to 1975 in the Gobi Desert. Cygnosaurus was named in 1979 by Altangeral Pearl. The genus name means slow lizard, and the species name Galbanensis refers to the Galban region in the Gobi Desert. Fossils found include the lower jaw, neck, and tailbones, parts of the ribs, hips, parts of the shoulder, and limb bones, arms and legs. Some of the fossils have been damaged since they were collected, and some of the bones that were described have since disappeared, and some of the bones were incorrectly assigned, so that doesn't help. Fossils have also been found in Kumamoto, Japan in the Jobu Formation that include vertebrae, limb bones, and teeth. Originally, those were considered to be Allosaurus, but later the fossils were reassigned to Cegnosaurus. Cegnosaurus are so weird. Yes. Cegnosaurus lived in a semi-arid climate with rivers and lakes. Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place include the Tyrannosaur, Conkulu, the Ornithomimosaur, Gerudimimus, the Dromaeosaur, Achilobator, the Ankylosaur, Talarurus, the Hadrosaur, Gobihadros, the Sauropod, Ercatu, the Ceratopsian Graciloceratops, and this is in addition to the other Therazenosaurs, and some other animals that lived around the same time and place include crocodiliforms and turtles. And our fun fact is, Turtles probably feared earthquakes more than sauropods, as a new track site with 1,000 paddle-shaped footprints likely shows turtles stampeding in panic after an earthquake. Was it an earthquake or was it just sauropods walking? It was not. They were in water. Anyway, this was published by Paolo Sandroni and others in Cretaceous Research. And from the abstract, it says, The footprints probably represent a stampede of panicking sea turtles that were mobilized in mass by an earthquake. So in 2019, there was a group of free climbers, free climbing is when you only use your body, shoes, and chalk. And they were on the slope of Monte Canero in Italy and found a bunch of fossilized footprints that looked like a herd of running animals. And it turns out it was more than a thousand paddle-shaped footprints on what was once an ancient seafloor. You're talking about dinosaur footprints on a sheer face in Italy. Now we're talking about turtle prints on a sheer face in Italy. Footprints can end up anywhere. Or flipper prints. Yeah. So these footprints are from the late Cretaceous around 83 to 80 million years ago. And they were made during a time of lots of seismic activity or earthquakes and climate change. So the footprints may have been preserved immediately from sediments flowing over the area from an earthquake. They're probably footprints of a stampede of turtles possibly panicking from the earthquake. Plesiosaurs and mosasaurs could also make paddle-like prints, but they were more solitary. Sea turtles, however, sometimes come together to lay eggs, so they're not as solitary, and it seems more likely they're the ones that made the tracks. And also, fish don't make paddle-like prints, so it wasn't fish. But it could have also just been turtles rushing back into the ocean if a dinosaur was nearby? I don't think so. Okay. There will be more studies in the future, so maybe we'll learn more. The team's hoping to involve technologists, the people who study trace fossils, in the future studies. So we'll find out. It's also possible something else made those marks, not turtles. So what's with the they were more afraid of earthquakes than sauropods piece of the fact? I said they probably feared earthquakes more than sauropods because we've got proof that they were stampeding. Oh, and we don't have proof of sauropod stampeding? Not in panic. Okay. Yeah. I think this is one of those absence of evidence not being evidence of absence, though, because do we even have prints of a sauropod during an earthquake to see how they reacted? But isn't it fun to think about? I guess so. Yeah. And on that fun note, that wraps up this episode of I Know Dino. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned. In a couple weeks, we'll be back with an episode, a sauropod shindig episode, because that includes four new sauropods. In the meantime, you can enjoy our next dino download for our patrons, which will be about dinosaurs and art and a lot of sculptures. And you can listen to that at patreon.com slash I Know Dino. Thanks again, and until next time. before you go a quick reminder that we are sending out our bahatosaurus exclusive patches to all of our dino dolls at the triceratops tier and above in march so if you would like to get yours make sure to join our patreon at patreon.com slash i know dino before february 28th and if you want to see the patch you can also see it on patreon i think it looks great personally sabrina did most of the work but i put on some finishing touches and then of course somebody else printed it for us sewed it maybe i should say it's got really nice relief of the spines of the hotosaurus but of course now we think it had a sail around it so that is also depicted so check it out patreon.com slash i know dino