Dinosaur dance floor. That’s catchy, isn’t it? Alliterative, rhyming, and instantly evocative. Few could resist it and a bit below and as evidence is listed a sampling of stories by headline. As the news gets its propulsion from the University of Utah, The Tracker suspected at first its imaginative press officer, Lee Siegel, had cooked the phrase up and the world’s media fell into line. A one-time AP science writer, he’s good at concocting catchy hooks for stories and seeing reporters go for it (check out this earlier post on a plant, the insects that pollinate it, and hot sex).

But nope, no overt press agentry inspiration or manipulation here. The phrase, it appears from the release’s extensive quotes, arose before Siegel showed up and in the minds of the academics themselves. It’s a fine press release, with quite a bit of background and all the quotes a reporter would need. The news is that what had been taken to be erosional potholes in an exposed sandstone surface along the border with Arizona are footprints of Jurassic dinosaurs. Hundreds,, maybe thousands of them, of several species. Properly, it’s a trampled surface. Tail-drag marks are there, too. The formal report is in a journal called Palaios. It seems notable that the work was by geologists, not paleontologists. And it also seems likely none of the dinos did any dancing. Never mind. The imagery is too good to suppress.

Stories:

AP – Mike Stark: Geologists discover ‘dinosaur dance floor’  ;

Waco Tribune – Ken Sury :  ‘Dinosaur dance floor’ site intrigues geologists ; (He gets in the non-Jurassic T. rex doing the hokey pokey.) ;

National Geographic News – Rebecca Carroll: Dinosaur “Dance Floor” Found in Arizona   ; (She digs up a few paleontologists who are unconvinced that these aren’t, after all, just natural potholes) ;

Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: View / A “Dinosaur Dance Floor” ;

BBC : Rock records dino ‘dance floor’ ;

Salt Lake Tribune – Biran Maffly :  U. geologists’ discovery: Was S. Utah site of a dance of the dinosaurs? ; (he focusses on the grad student whose brainstorm provided the footprint diagnosis. And yes, it appears unclear from the news accounts whether the footprints are in Arizona or Utah, or both. The published paper highlights Arizona) ;

For a thorough and more scholarly look, see Smithsonian.com and its item by Brian Switek, “What Dinosaurs Walked Here?” The nomenclature explanation is a distinctly different angle for the story.

Grist for the Mill.

Univ. Utah Press Release ; Journal abstract ;

-CP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.