A diverse mammal-dominated, footprint assemblage from wetland deposits in the Lower Cretaceous of Maryland
More than 100 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed Maryland. So did our ancestors — small mammals the size of squirrels or badgers — and the flying reptiles know as pterosaurs.
Amazingly, the footprints of all these creatures of the Cretaceous era were preserved on a single 8.5-foot-long slab of sandstone unearthed on the grounds of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., not far north of the nation’s capital.
“It’s unusual to have such a large concentration of different kinds of tracks and small tracks in such a small space,” said Martin Lockley, an emeritus geology professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who studied the tracks.
Dr. Lockley and his colleagues described the findings in Nature.com published Wednesday and in the journal Scientific Reports. The slab offers unique insights into the behavior of dinosaurs and early mammals; possibly some of the dinosaurs were looking to make a meal of the mammals.
All this might never have been discovered if [Ray Stanford] an amateur dinosaur fossil hunter hadn’t gone to lunch with his wife not long before the construction of a new building obliterated the site. Continue reading the main NY Times story
Here is the CBS Evening News segment on Ray's find:
More than 100 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed Maryland. So did our ancestors — small mammals the size of squirrels or badgers — and the flying reptiles know as pterosaurs.
Amazingly, the footprints of all these creatures of the Cretaceous era were preserved on a single 8.5-foot-long slab of sandstone unearthed on the grounds of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., not far north of the nation’s capital.
“It’s unusual to have such a large concentration of different kinds of tracks and small tracks in such a small space,” said Martin Lockley, an emeritus geology professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who studied the tracks.
Dr. Lockley and his colleagues described the findings in Nature.com published Wednesday and in the journal Scientific Reports. The slab offers unique insights into the behavior of dinosaurs and early mammals; possibly some of the dinosaurs were looking to make a meal of the mammals.
All this might never have been discovered if [Ray Stanford] an amateur dinosaur fossil hunter hadn’t gone to lunch with his wife not long before the construction of a new building obliterated the site. Continue reading the main NY Times story
Here is the CBS Evening News segment on Ray's find:
