(Editor’s Note: Click on the photo at left to watch a video feature.)

What do sand volleyball and urban chickens have to do with geology? Plenty, says Boise State geosciences lecturer Sam Matson. In the early hours of March 21, he helped undergraduates make the connection through a one-of-a-kind lab.

The lab, part of Matson’s historical geology course, involved chasing backyard chickens through a “racetrack” set up on the sand volleyball court outside Towers Hall. The marks left in the sand simulated fossil trackways, which have been used to determine the speeds at which dinosaurs moved in the ancient world.

“Like other sciences, paleontology is about testing ideas and answering questions — using what we do know to figure out what we don’t know. One goal is to understand the biology of extinct organisms. Body fossils provide valuable information about anatomy, but they are less clear about physiology, ecology and behavior,” Matson said. “One way of filling in these gaps in our understanding is through uniformitarianism, essentially using the present as a key to the past.”

The uniformitarian approach assumes that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our universe now always have and apply everywhere. That means the biomechanics, physiology and behavior of living animals (chickens) can provide clues about these same characteristics in animals from the past (dinosaurs). Adding even more weight to the comparison, molecular evidence from fossils confirmed a few years ago that chickens are distant cousins of the fearsome predator Tyrannosaurus rex.

In order to test the concept of using modern animals to make inferences about extinct ones, Matson’s students measured their own feet and hip heights as well as that of their three feathered test subjects, Ella, Dora and Nicer. Then it was off to the races. The distance between footprints left in the sand was measured for different speeds, and the students recorded and analyzed their data immediately using iPod Touch devices issued through Boise State’s new m-Learning Scholars Program, designed to explore the unique teaching and learning environment enabled by mobile technology. Matson said this on-site analysis allowed students to think critically about experimental design and measurement error and to make improvements to the experiment as it progressed.

The collected data was compared to published stats for a non-avian dinosaur nicknamed “Big Al” (short for Allosaurus fragilis) through reconstructions of fossil trackways chalked on the nearby Greenbelt.

“If the data for humans and chickens fall on or near the trend line in the graph, we can confirm the hypothesis suggested by the published data — that all upright vertebrate animals (dinosaurs included) move essentially the same way,” said Matson. “If we can assume that dinosaurs also fall along that trend line, then we can measure their relative stride length and use it to calculate their velocity.”

Judging by this representation of the results of the experiment, the assumptions involved with uniformitarian science are valid, as is the idea that humans would have had trouble running from hungry dinosaurs.

“Nothing deepens learning about Earth’s history like bringing the past to life and making it real,” Matson said.