Quicksand Fans

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/02/97290599 ... r-dinosaur

I've heard of this find before but it got me thinking. Modern thinking is that you can't fully sink under in quicksand. So did prehistoric quicksand behave differently? Or were dinosaurs density different enough that they would sink all the way in?

Some of them could've pushed each other under in a panic to escape, or they might have just been stuck and died of exposure.
There's a scene in a fictional novel by Robert Bakker called "Raptor Red" where a male and female attack a larger herbivore stuck in mud, and the male ends op drowning after the carcass shifts while they're eating and falls over on him, so there's another theory.

Having hiked some of the canyons in Utah and seen the conditions there, I'd say that the dinosaurs probably got stuck and then died of exposure, as Mynock said, or drowned and further silted over in subsequent flash floods. It's hard to know exactly what the terrain in that area was like 65+ million years ago, but flash floods are the big danger in those canyons now. Given that they were buried in sandstone, floods were probably a big hazard back then, too. For a large animal of limited intellect or experience, just having your legs or feet stuck in quicksand could prove fatal for several reasons.

Quicksand is good for SO many things!

I once read of a prehistoric hominid skeleton that was found after having been trapped in perfect vertical location by what was referred to as "quickmud". I really don't think we give soft earth enough credit for being able to swallow something completely when the conditions are right. I know I've had more than one "Oh Shit!" moment like that myself.

An interesting semi-related bit: paleontologists have found areas of vertical "columns" underneath the tracks of enormous sauropods (probably Argentinosaurus) which crossed what was an ancient wet "ash bed," each column directly under the footprint containing the fossils of one or several of the very small Gasparinisaura genus of dinosaur. Speculation is that the enormous pressure of the giant sauropod footfalls would turn the wet ash and sand underneath into small pits of quicksand which trapped and engulfed any hapless small creatures which blundered into them.

This is illustrated in episode 5 of the "Planet Dinosaur' series. You can see a clip on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mjqxLve8j8