Dave Hone

Yeah.

That's a powerful signal in paleontology.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've done really quite a lot of work on it.

And they can tell you an awful lot if you've got the right understanding of the burial conditions.

Because you...

Weird thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate is you basically can't take fossils at face value, particularly when you're trying to get into stuff like behavior and ecology, because...

Between the animal dying and the paleontologist digging it up, potentially quite a lot has happened.

And that's where it's really easy to start misinterpreting things.

Because if you just go, I had one like this not too long ago where I was an editor on a paper.

And the authors had done a pretty good job, to be fair.

But it was this discussion of whether or not several animals were together at the time of their death.

It said multiple theropods together in this quarry.

And it's like, right, but there was loads of debris and you had loads of things like fish scales and other small bones.

And it's like, okay, but this looks like these animals potentially died somewhere else.

And then a flood or a river washed them into this bay or a channel or then the water level dropped and they ended up together.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they were together when they died.

And so just because you've got three animals together, what is potentially the story of how they got there?

So you have to consider multiple explanations and then try to figure out what is the most likely.

Yeah.