Swimming Dinosaurs

There seems to be evidence that dinosaurs could swim. It seems rather logical to me that this would be the case- most lizards can swim. Some iguanas spend lots of time underwater down in the Galapagos. Just about all animals can swim, including elephants. But for some reason, seeing a sketch of a swimming bipedal dinosaur predator strikes me as a frightening notion.

From the AFP here:

Twelve footprints found in the bed of an ancient lake in northern Spain have thrown up the first compelling evidence that some land dinosaurs could swim, researchers reported Thursday.

The swimmer is believed to have been a therapod — the vast family of carnivorous dinos that included the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex — which lived in the Early Cretaceous, some 125 million years ago.

The prints paint a beguiling picture of a large, buoyant dinosaur whose clawed feet raked the sediment as it swam in a depth of some 3.2 metres (10.4 feet) of water.”The dinosaur swam with alternating movements of the two hind limbs, a pelvic paddle swimming motion,” said co-author Loic Costeur. “It is a swimming style of amplified walking, with movements similar to those used by modern bipeds, including aquatic birds.”

The question as to whether dinosaurs could swim has been debated for years.

Asked by AFP to speculate as to which dinosaur may have made the tracks, Costeur cautiously pointed to the allosaurus — a bipedal carnivorous dinosaur with a large skull balanced by a long, heavy tail. Some allosauruses could reach more than 10 metres (32 feet) in length.

I think that all men daydream about what it would be like to live in a world with dinosaurs-  its one of the things that made Jurassic Park such a popular movie series.  Now that daydream just got much more frightening if you imagine that killer dinos could swim across lakes to get you.