GC3NXP0 Dinosaurs #3: Saturnalia tupiniquim (Traditional Cache) in Florida, United States created by Miwa Satoshi

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A cache by Miwa Satoshi Message this owner

Hidden : 7/11/2012

Difficulty:

Terrain:

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

An easy cache for the numbers, placed next to a Brazilian potato place my wife and I enjoy. Generally a fair amount of muggle traffic here in the daytime, but nothing too extraordinary.

We tend to think of dinosaurs as giants, but they certainly didn't start out that way.

Saturnalia tupiniquim was an early example of a "sauropodomorph", one of a group of long-necked, primarily herbivorous dinosaurs which would later grow to immense sizes and include the famous "Brontosaurus" of Flintstones fame (now known properly as Apatosaurus) and the Brachiosaurus of Jurassic Park (also subject to name change and now split off as Giraffatitan, underlying the massive changes that have occurred in recent dinosaur science). Unlike those legends of great size, Saturnalia was maybe at most five feet long from head to tail, and being so low-slung, it would probably be about knee-high to most adult humans and would likely have run away from a human if there weren't 225 million years separating us from them.

The three partial skeletons that comprised the initial basis for Saturnalia were discovered in Brazil, in its southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, which has an extensive area of exposed fossil beds known as the Geopark of Paleorrota (in English, "paleo route"). Several other dinosaurs, including the predator Staurikosaurus, have been found here, but in the Late Triassic, the big men on campus were predators like Prestosuchus: sinewy, long-bodied, four-legged ambush predators not too dissimilar from crocodiles, but with snaggletoothed heads more like some sort of beta test for T. rex. Oh yeah, and they topped twenty feet on average, more than enough to swallow Saturnalia for lunch. A Late Triassic extinction event knocked out those apex predators, though, paving the way for dinosaurs to attain greater heights.

Fossils attributed to Saturnalia have also been discovered in Zimbabwe, cementing the notion that at least in their time, the Atlantic was hardly an insurmountable barrier to migration to these lithe plant-eaters (and in all likelihood, didn't even exist).

So, why is it called Saturnalia tupiniquim when it clearly doesn't look like a compact car made in Tennessee? Well, Saturnalia was discovered in mid-summer 1999, during that most famous of Brazilian festivals: Carnaval. The original Latin word for "carnival" is Saturnalia ("the feast of Saturn"). And tupiniquim is the Brazilian Portuguese / Tupi-Guarani word for the native people of coastal southern Brazil.

Trust the Brazilians to name a dinosaur after a party!

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No room for FTF prize, unfortunately : this one's a repurposed pencil lead container. Please try to be careful retrieving and replacing the log, as not every cacher carries tweezers. Please replace as found (there should be some form of camo on the cache). Plenty of parking nearby.