RE: Guanlong necks in the Xinjiang deposits?

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@umd.edu>]

These necks have not been described in detail. But the idea about the death 
pits isn't so much that they were holes in the ground at
the time: rather, they were mires like quicksand. Picture when you walk along a 
beach, sometimes you see the quicksand-like
consistency of the sand in your footprint. This is the same basic effect that 
happened with the sauropod tracks.

After that, it was sort of like the La Brea tarpits: animals like Limusaurus 
get trapped, and their smell &/or cry attracts
predators like Guanlong, who also get trapped.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tholtz@umd.edu   Phone: 301-405-4084
Office: Centreville 1216                        
Senior Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology
Dept. of Geology, University of Maryland
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/
Fax: 301-314-9661               

Faculty Director, Science & Global Change Program, College Park Scholars
http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc
Fax: 301-314-9843

Mailing Address:        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                        Department of Geology
                        Building 237, Room 1117
                        University of Maryland
                        College Park, MD 20742 USA
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-DINOSAUR@usc.edu [mailto:owner-DINOSAUR@usc.edu] On Behalf Of 
> Anthony Docimo
> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 12:23 AM
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Guanlong necks in the Xinjiang deposits?
> 
> Have the neck bones of Guanlong fossils in the [Upper Jurassic] Xinjiang 
> deposits proven to be more likely to be missing or
broken,
> than either other tyrannosaurids, or other dinosaurs of their size bracket?
> 
> 
> 
> (reason: I've been reading about the fossils lately - the BBC's book 'Planet 
> Dinosaur' - and it when I tried visualizing what it
was
> describing...(the sauropod footfall-made pits filling with sediments and 
> little critters, then relatively bigger things falling
in)...the necks
> were the primary question mark for my mind's eye...which led to that question)
> 
> > Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:12:56 -0700
> > To: dinosaur@usc.edu