Whale-sized shonisaurs dominated the ocean 230 million years ago. A fossil cluster offers a fascinating glimpse at how they lived—based on where they died.
“It was a neat proof of concept, and a surprising discovery,” Pyenson says, because 3D scanning allowed for the data to be analyzed away from the actual site over long time periods. “It was innovative, because none of those fossil whales ever left Chile.”
They turned to chemical sampling and huge 3D scans of the site to test some hypotheses. Long-range lasers allow researchers to digitize enormous surfaces down to a centimeter scale. The resulting “point cloud” shows where each skeleton sits in space. “When you're confronted with parts of the skeleton that arelarge and also distributed over a very large area,” says Pyenson, “taking one photo doesn't really provide the kind of data you need to test the ideas you have.
Then they tried to figure out what else might have been going on. They inferred from the location that although the water was deep, the site had not been too far from shore. Although Nevada is inland today, this park is thought to have once been a tropical gulf near an archipelago, or cluster of islands. “Archipelagos are really good environments if you want to be protected,” says Pyenson. “So that setting becomes really important when you consider the other clues that we collected.
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