The Boneyard XX

[Note: I believe I have all the entries that have been submitted for this edition of The Boneyard. If yours is missing please let me know asap and I will put it in immediately.]

Early Saturday morning, before the sun burned off the last bit of moisture left by the previous night's rainstorm, my wife and I struck off for the beach of Cape Henlopen State Park. In May and June, when the tide is high and the moon is full, horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) crawl out of the surf to spawn. Not all of them make it back to the water, however, and the beach was littered with slowly drying dead & dying chelicerates.

A few still clung on to life, waving their legs in the air and pushing into the damp sand with their telsons in vain, but most had already expired. Their bodies were covered in small gastropods, the radula of each snail slowly working away at the dessicated bodies, although the gulls would do far more damage had they had the appetite for horseshoe crab that morning.

Walking through the horseshoe crab graveyard was oddly familiar. I had never been to the beach before, nor had a I seen a Limulus outside of a "touch tank," but the taphonomic processes taking place on that beach recalled another hot summer day I spent in another sandy location. The Inversand marl pit in southern New Jersey contains within its sediments the remains of dinosaurs, mosasaurs, marine crocodylians, birds, fish, and a seemingly endless supply of "snails." There are so many gastropod shells that it is entirely possible to become weighted down with them and have little room to collect anything else. They're often found scattered throughout the pit in the "main fossiliferous layer," a part of the strata from the end of the Mesozoic about 70 to 65 million years old, but they are often found in clusters around bones of the larger vertebrates. If you find a bunch of gastropod fossils close together, there may be something more underneath. Just as the living snails slowly scraped away at the book gills of the Limulus, so too did ancient gastropods make the most of decaying "free meals."

What I saw on that Delaware beach was an interaction that has been going on for tens (if not hundreds) of millions of years. I tried to imagine the body of a large mosasaur washed up on the beach, seagulls picking away at the tattered flesh of its side while snails almost imperceptibly crawling into the gaping holes of the carcass to feast inside. Thankfully I cannot imagine odors, but I could not help but admire that the same processes preserved in the Cretaceous greensand were still at work in the world today.

My interactions with the gastropods and Limulus on the shore pale in comparison to the interactions other bloggers have been having with ancient life, however;

• Christopher Taylor has learned much from his "Conversations with Cothurnocystis."

• Barnum Brown might have "[brought] 'em back petrified," but Nemo Ramjet wants a live Hatzegopteryx.

• Matt of the HMNH embraces his inner fish.

• David of paleomammalsonline finds that it's harder to avoid mammoths than find them in the first place.

• Scarlet Seraph tells a tale that reminds me of an old tune (only slightly modified) "If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise. For ev'ry [theropod] that ever there was, will gather there for certain, because, today's the day the [Bambiraptor] have their picnic.

• We all know what happens if you leave a baked potato in the microwave too long, but what happens when you leave your Spinosaurus eggs near the gamma-ray emitter? Mo tells us how things turned out.

• Emile takes us back to have a look at "Lucy," although what the hominin was looking at is another question entirely.

• Aww, Traumador the Tyrannosaur is in love. His dinner date with Lillian the Albertosaurus, however, is anything but cute.

• I asked bloggers to talk about meeting a prehistoric creature for this edition of the Boneyard; Peter Bond goes all-out and gets some face-time with nearly half of the fauna from the Mesozoic.

• From the museum to the field, Craig takes us along with him to meet a variety of creatures from Anomalocaris to the "Corythosaur of Doom."

• Want to stage your own meeting with a prehistoric creature? The PI team takes readers through a step-by-step lesson on how to "burst the limits of time."

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this special edition of The Boneyard, but there is still something that I will need your help to settle. The above entries are all entered in a contest to win the following;

• 1st Prize: The Earth on Show

• 2nd Prize: Dinosaurs: Past and Present (Volume 2) or a $10 amazon.com gift card

• 3rd Prize: Men and Dinosaurs or a $5 amazon.com gift card

The winners will be decided by the number of votes they receive in the comment section of this post over the next week (voting will close on Monday, May 26 at 12 PM eastern time, one vote per person). (Votes should be in the form of ranking your top three picks in order of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place nominations.) If there is a tie, Mrs. Laelaps and I will confer cast make the decision. The winners will then be contacted by me and the 2nd and 3rd prize winners will be able to choose the gift cards if they already have/don't want the books listed. It's as simple as that, and good luck to all the contestants!

[Also, the Boneyard needs a host for the next edition on May 31st. If anyone is interested, please say so in the comments.]