Tail wagging dinosaurs

One good thing about lockdown is that we listen to a lot of radio. Today I chanced on a lovely story about a 3 year research project which has demonstrated that dinosaurs wagged their tails. Not in friendly greeting, but as an aid to balance and mobility. Like we use our arms, but dinosaurs had short arms so they had tails instead.
 
The image is a dinosaur footprint, preserved in mud 95 million years ago. It’s at Lark Quarry, in outback Queensland, which we visited in 2014. Lark Quarry is said to be the site of the only known dinosaur stampede.
 
According to the Dinosaurtrackways website, 95 million years ago Lark Quarry was part of a great river plain, with sandy channels, swamps, and lakes brimming with freshwater mussels, lungfish, and crocodiles. Rainfall was over a metre per year, so the surrounding lowland forest was lush and green. Very different from Lark Quarry today (extra).
 
On the day our drama unfolds, herds of small two-legged dinosaurs came to drink at the lake. There were at least 150 dinosaurs of two different kinds - carnivorous coelurosaurs about the size of chickens, and slightly larger plant-eating ornithopods, some of them as large as emus. A huge meat-eating theropod approached the lake. It slowed, saw the other dinosaurs gathered at the water’s edge and began to stalk, then turned and charged. The stampeding herd of smaller dinosaurs left a chaotic mass of footprints in the mud as they ran to escape.

I hope their tails helped them get away.