In the summer of 2017, Joshua Malone, then an undergraduate at Augustana College in Illinois, visited a field research camp in Wyoming and picked up some rocks. Rounded at the edges and the size of small fists, they were out of place amid the fine-grained mudrock that had surrounded them, and Mr. Malone asked his father, David Malone, a geologist at Illinois State University who led the dig at the site, if he knew where the rocks had come from.
Four years later, the two have developed a surprising answer.
In a study published earlier this year in the journal Terra Nova, the Malones with colleagues say the stones came from a rock formation in southern Wisconsin about 1,000 miles to the east of where they were found. What’s even more surprising is their hypothesis for how the rocks made that journey: The researchers say they were carried in the guts of long-neck dinosaurs.
