On some seafloors of the Ligurian Sea, sediment mounds tower smaller openings. Each mound is likely to be connected with the nearby openings, forming a tunnel system that resembles the fossil burrow Thalassinoides.
Thalassinoides is a genus of fossil burrow consisting of horizontal branched tunnels with vertical shafts (see Dirk Knaust’s Atlas of Trace Fossils in Well Core). When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Thalassinoides (and its producers) roamed the sea!
andrea: I am Andrea ‘Tracemaker’ Baucon. My research interests focus on palaeontology, with particular emphasis on the study of life-substrate interactions. In my research, I addressed three main questions: (1) What drives the distribution of burrows? (2) How do mass-extinctions modify burrowing behaviour? (3) Do life-substrate interactions exist beyond Earth? I tackled these questions using quantitative methods (fractal analysis, network theory, geostatistics) and analogy with modern life-substrate interactions (actuopalaeontology).
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