The sun rose in the sky and fresh bird tracks criss-crossed the cayenne-coloured sand.
They ultimately showed that rather than keeping track of every neighbor within a certain distance, each bird tracks and responds to a finite number of its closest neighbors — seven in the case of starling flocks.
Chris Filardi, director of Pacific Programs at the American Museum of Natural History, heard the distinctive "kokoko-kiew" call of the male bird, tracked it down - and then killed it, according to animal newsite The Dodo.
Young and Leonard then used this data to create a mathematical model that allowed them to evaluate the varying levels of coordination or consensus in the flocks depending on how many neighbors each bird tracks during flight.
It is said that the formation holds the world's greatest known cache of fossilized bird tracks.
Israeli ornithologist Yossi Leshem says the incident is the third such arrest (so to speak) of a bird tracked by Israeli scientists in 3 decades.
The scientific article, "Bird Tracks from the Upper Cretaceous Cantwell Formation of Denali National Park, Alaska, USA: a new perspective on ancient northern polar vertebrate biodiversity," was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology, volume 9, Issue 1, March 2011, pages 33 49 (http://www.informaworld.com/).
The art in the main chamber consists of a red hand print on the wall and a roof fall block on the floor with pecked pits and an engraved bird track.
The true shape of the pecked pits and an engraved bird track found in one shelter is best visualised through a 3D output, especially compared to traditional rock art recording methods.
Fiorello said that "The diversity of fossil bird tracks in the Cantwell formation of Denali is second to none anywhere in the world" and "contains riches beyond our expectations…Every year we go in there, every year we find new things, every year we come out and have to readjust the [theoretical] models…We haven't even begun to hit the point where the data are hitting a plateau".
