Pterosaur Beach (French: Plage aux Ptérosaures) is a French
palaeoichnologic site bearing tracks made by dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Located on the Mas de Pégourdy in the commune of
Crayssac in the
department of Lot, the site is notable because it is the first place that the
fossil footprint
A fossil track or ichnite (Greek "''ιχνιον''" (''ichnion'') – a track, trace or footstep) is a fossilized footprint. This is a type of trace fossil. A fossil trackway is a sequence of fossil tracks left by a single organism. Over the year ...
s of a landing
pterosaur
Pterosaurs are an extinct clade of flying reptiles in the order Pterosauria. They existed during most of the Mesozoic: from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 million to 66 million years ago). Pterosaurs are the earli ...
have been discovered. The fossil footprints are approximately 140 million years old.
Description
Pterosaur Beach was, at the end of the
Jurassic
The Jurassic ( ) is a Geological period, geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system that spanned from the end of the Triassic Period million years ago (Mya) to the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, approximately 143.1 Mya. ...
era, a
mudflat
Mudflats or mud flats, also known as tidal flats or, in Ireland, slob or slobs, are coastal wetlands that form in intertidal areas where sediments have been deposited by tides or rivers. A global analysis published in 2019 suggested that tidal ...
, flooded at high tide, on a marine lagoon in a
gulf
A gulf is a large inlet from an ocean or their seas into a landmass, larger and typically (though not always) with a narrower opening than a bay (geography), bay. The term was used traditionally for large, highly indented navigable bodies of s ...
that opened on the
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the ...
between
Bordeaux
Bordeaux ( ; ; Gascon language, Gascon ; ) is a city on the river Garonne in the Gironde Departments of France, department, southwestern France. A port city, it is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the Prefectures in F ...
and the island of
Oléron
The Isle of Oléron or Oléron Island (, ; Saintongese dialect, Saintongese: ''ilâte d'Olerun''; , ) is an island off the Atlantic coast of France (due west of Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, Rochefort), on the southern side of the Pertuis d'Antio ...
. On it, animals foraged for food. The site has hundreds of fossilized trackways. The site as a whole covers an area of around 10 hectares and is 1.2 metres thick.
The site was discovered in 1993.
Jean-Michel Mazin, research director of the
CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
at
Claude Bernard University, oversaw the research there.
Forty species of
ichnotaxa
An ichnotaxon (plural ichnotaxa) is "a taxon based on the fossilized work of an organism", i.e. the non-human equivalent of an artifact. ''Ichnotaxon'' comes from the Ancient Greek (''íchnos'') meaning "track" and English , itself derived from ...
have been identified.
Pterosaur Beach is protected by a metallic building, in which paleontologists work in near-complete darkness, for only a raking light can expose the ground contours and sometimes reveal new tracks.
In 2009, the paleontologist
Kevin Padian
Kevin Padian (born 1951) is an American paleontologist. He is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Curator of Paleontology, University of California Museum of Paleontology, and was President of the National ...
from the University of California at Berkeley, studied one set of pterosaur beach prints and suggested that they represented an aerial landing with the pterosaur's two "feet" side by side; then, after a jump, its two "hands" were used, and the pterosaur began to walk on all fours. For his part, the paleontologist David Unwin did not exclude that these could be swimming marks. Padian replied that if that were the case, the marks would be less clear, less marked.
Martin Lockley
Martin G. Lockley (17 March 1950 – 25 November 2023) was a Welsh palaeontologist. He was educated in the United Kingdom where he obtained degrees (BSc and PhD) and post-doctoral experience in Geology in the 1970s. Since 1980 he has been a pr ...
also judged that it was indeed a landing; the other hypotheses were not convincing.
[.]
Gallery
Lot Plage aux ptérosaures 8 empreintes ptérosaures Émile 3.jpg, "Émile" prints
Lot Plage aux ptérosaures 10 empreinte et patte reconstituée.jpg, Reconstructed footprint and paw
Lot Plage aux ptérosaures 6 visites guidée.jpg, Guided tour
See also
*
References
External links
First record of a pterosaur landing trackway by Jean-Michel Mazin, Jean-Paul Billon-Bruyat, and Kevin Padian, ''Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences'', 2009
*
ttp://www.plageauxpterosaures.fr Plage aux ptérosaures
Beach
A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from Rock (geology), rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle beach, shingle, pebbles, etc., or biological s ...
Jurassic France
Fossil trackways
Paleontology in France
Landforms of Lot (department)
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