Those are the big dinosaurs, the herbivores who wandered about on four legs, didn’t have holes in their bones, and didn’t turn into chickens. But didn’t you ever wonder if they stepped on their fellow denizens of the primordial Earth?
The answer appears to be Yes! From the paleorXiv server, the abstract of Under the feet of sauropods: A trampled coastal marine turtle from the Late Jurassic of Switzerland?
by Christian Püntener, Jean-Paul Billon-Bruyat, Daniel Marty, and Géraldine Paratte:
Recent excavations from the “Paléontologie A16” project brought to light thousands of dinosaur footprints and numer-ous turtle remains from the Late Jurassic of Porrentruy (Swiss Jura Mountains). While most fossil turtles (Thalassochelydia) were found in marly layers that were deposited in a coastal marine paleoenvironment, the dinosaur (theropods and sauropods) tracks were found in laminites that were deposited in a tidal flat environment. Despite extensive exploration, very few fossils were found in these dinosaur track-bearing laminites. On one occasion, a sub-complete turtle shell (Plesiochelys bigleri) was discovered within the laminites, embedded just beneath an important sauropod track level. The state of preservation of this specimen suggests that the turtle died on the tidal flat and was quickly buried. This is the first evidence that these turtles occasionally visited tidal flat paleoenvironments. Moreover, the particular configuration of the fossil turtle suggests that the shell was possibly trodden on by a large sauropod dinosaur.
The actual paper is here. They suggest the turtle was already dead when trampled, and I do hope so. Not so much intellectually interesting as morbidly fascinating, I know. However, given the size of a sauropod foot and how the turtle compares to it, that was a large turtle.
