Crab and Sauropod Fossil Together

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

Came across this by accident. From April 2003. Great picture.


http://record.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/539.html

Dinosaur, crab fossils reveal ecosystem secrets

For centuries, they wouldn't be caught dead next to each other.

But now a team of geologists directed by Joshua Smith, Ph.D., assistant
professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has found a
well-preserved fossil of a crab within inches of a tail vertebra from a
massive plant-eating dinosaur.

Necrocarcinidae (crab), meet titanosaurian sauropod (dinosaur).

The find, in Egypt's Bahariya Oasis, is the first instance of a crab
fossil found with a dinosaur fossil. It reveals much about both species
and the kind of ecosystem where the fossils were found, thought to be a
predator-rich mangrove setting dominated by tree ferns and other coastal
plants, similar to Florida's swampy Everglades.

The rocks containing these fossils are about 94 million years old, which
means they date back to the Cretaceous Period, some 65 million to 130
million years ago.  ... "As far as we can tell from the literature, this
is the first confirmed notice of a crab associated with a dinosaur," said
Schweitzer [geologist Carrie E. Schweitzer, Ph.D., of the Kent State
University Department of Geology], who is the lead author on the crab
paper. "The find is significant because it permits paleontologists to
frame a very diverse and thus much more accurate description of what these
ancient environments would have looked like.
...