Emu provide living link to dinosaurs

By Linda Bell
Livermore Correspondent

Little did Terry and Linn Turner realize when they started raising emu in the Cherokee Park area of Livermore that their flightless birds might someday help unlock paleontological secrets of mid-Jurassic dinosaur development.

A chance meeting at the Laramie Farmers' Market last summer with Brent Breithaupt, director of the geological museum at the University of Wyoming, opened the way for the Turners' emu to be part of a study that will help geologists better understand the hundreds of thousands of dinosaur footprint impressions, approximately 165 million years old, identified in 1997 in northern Wyoming's Bighorn Basin.

Breithaupt said no skeletal remains of the dinosaurs that left the tracks have been found, but the size and shape of the three-toed footprints are almost identical to those of the omnivorous emu--the national bird of Australia. "By documenting the emu feet and growth patterns from hatchling through adult size, we can begin to understand the variations in track size found at the Yellow Brick Road Dinosaur Tracksite," he said.

Emu can help determine the approximate weight, height, stride speed and societal patterns in the dinosaur footprints, Breithaupt explained.

Breithaupt has been visiting the Rabbit Creek Emu Ranch every week since new emu hatched in early March. He has been documenting their size and weight and making plaster casts of their feet or footprints. Emu are considered adult size at 12 to 14 months, and breed at 2 years.

A common genetic link between meat-eating dinosaurs and birds living today is a widely accepted theory, Breithaupt said, although no dinosaur DNA has yet been found for comparison. The large number of tracks found at the Yellow Brick Road Tracksite, conveniently located on BLM lands on remnant tidal flats of what once was the Sundance Sea, are especially significant because there is very little worldwide fossil evidence of any dinosaurs dating from the Middle Jurassic period, he said.

"No name has been given to the dinosaurs that made the tracks", Breithaupt said, "because we can only name the footprint, and those are not unique enough to be assigned an independent name. The shape and angle between the toes found in the Wyoming tracks are consistent with other carnivorous dinosaur track records found in South America, Asia and Europe."