Dinosaur Death Posture Explained

Jun 11, 02:16 PM

Current Headlines: U.S. scientists say the posture of many fossilized dinosaurs -- jaw opened, head thrown back and limbs contracted -- might have resulted from brain damage.

Professor Kevin Padian, curator of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California-Berkeley, and paleontologist Cynthia Marshall Faux of the Museum of the Rockies, said the fossils of numerous dinosaurs, as well as many early mammals, have been found exhibiting that posture. The explanation usually given by paleontologists is that the dinosaurs died in water and the currents drifted the bones into that position, or the posture was the result of rigor mortis.

I'm reading this in the literature and thinking, 'This doesn't make any sense to me as a veterinarian,' said lead author Faux, a veterinarian-turned-paleontologist.

Paleontologists aren't around sick and dying animals the way a veterinarian is, where you see this posture all the time in disease processes, in strychnine cases, in animals hit by a car or in some sort of extremis, she said.

Faux and Padian believe the dinosaurs died in that posture as a result of damage to their central nervous system, possibly from trauma or asphyxiation.

Their research appears in the journal Paleobiology.