I don’t have anything I want to add to the story about the tiny stegosaur footprint found in China, nothing which can’t be found in the press release or the journal paper, despite stegosaurs being one of my favourite dinosaur groups and having an interest in trace fossils. And I have nothing I want to say about how the story is being reported (like I quickly did with this footprint story). I just want to adore how cute it is. The reconstruction pictured above, by Kaitoge, is absolutely adorable, as is the actual fossil itself (pictured below). So what I will do is look at some of the headlines, particularly as some of those emphasise the cuteness. It’s a spectacular find regardless of the cute factor but that is a great way to catch the eye – it worked for me.
Tracks like this, with this particular one being the smallest known at 5.7 cm long, are rare compared to the larger tracks which are thought to have been made by stegosaurs. Trace fossils are given their own classifications as it is rare to be able to determine which animal made it, and in this one’s case it’s been identified as the ichnogenus Deltapodus. The trace-making stegosaur would have been about the size of a cat and may have even walked a bit like one by standing on its toes, unlike adult stegosaurs which walked with their heels to the ground, though it’s difficult to know based on one out-of-context footprint. But just look at those three little toes!
I did find one slightly misleading headline which, interestingly, was from the press release aggregator Phys.org, and made it sound like the remains of the baby steg had been found:
A lot of the headlines emphasised the size of the dinosaur, though some went for the cute angle, such as this one from Science Alert:
I’m not sure if it made me squee with joy but it had enough of an impact to make me write this post. The Daily Mail described it as adorable whilst starting with one of the most overused puns (and also made this glaring error, which I found despite not actually reading the article properly: “…the experts say they pesume [sic] the track was made by a dinosaur known as ichnogenus Deltapodus.”).
And finally, Live Science described it as a “Wee footprint,” and the stegosaur as “itty-bitty”:
Are we all in agreement that both the fossil and the reconstruction are cute? For more baby stegosaur cuteness, check out the work of Mariaelena Mariotti, aka MotherOfTheDinosaurs, on Instagram:
The Palaeobabbler 