Re: Mesozoic burrows?

[Richard W Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, Nicholas D. Pyenson wrote:
> jbois@umd5.umd.edu writes:
> >Are there any burrows known from the Mesozoic--burrows from small to
> >middle size mammals?  I saw a beautiful Miocene burrow at the Smithsonian
> >and thought it strange that I've never read of one from the Mesozoic.
> 
> just recently Science News (June 9, 158:22) had a great cover article on
> ichnology...
> although they're not *mammal* burrows, HP James MacEachern (Simon Fraser
> Univ., BC) and 
> his South African colleagues described a large system of tunnels in South
> Africa,
>  probably made by the cynodont _Trirachodon_ along the floodplain of a
> river (a similar system of tunnels 
> were discovered several kilometers away from MacEachern's site with 20
> _Trirachodon_ skeletons preserved in some of the tunnels, hence the
> inference)...
> more interesting is that some of the burrows were bilobate at the bottom, 
> suggesting bidirectional movement (a two-way street) and even possibly
> some form of sociality
> in Triassic cynodonts...
> HP Tony J. Martin at Emory University is also working on mammal burrows
> from the Two Medicine formation in Montana (at the other end of the
> Mesozoic and on the other side of the world).  I suggest contacting him at
> geoam@learnlink.emory.edu -- he'd be glad to answer your questions on
> burrows...

See

 http://www.cmnh.org/fun/dinosaur-archive/2001Jun/msg00347.html

where I posted excerpts from the article in Science News about this.

The Science News link is

 http://www.sciencenews.org/20010609/bob9.asp

The Science News article was on trace fossils but had other interesting
stuff in it.