In 2012, amateur paleontologist and dinosaur track aficionado Ray Stanford headed out to lunch with his wife Sheila, an information specialist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After dropping her off back at work, he noticed a chunk of rock sticking out of a nearby hill that was the exact same color as a piece he had found several years ago that contained a small dinosaur print. As Kenneth Change at The New York Times reports, the tip of the rock led to the discovery of an 8.5-foot long slab of sandstone with roughly 70 tracks from eight different species.
The rock dates back roughly 100 million years, and includes traces from both mammals and dinosaurs. It is one of the largest such concentrations of tracks ever found. Stanford and researchers from NASA/Goddard, University of Colorado, and Calvert Marine Museum published an analysis of the slab this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The concentration of mammal tracks on this site is orders of magnitude higher than any other site in the world,” co-author Martin Lockley, paleontologist with the University of Colorado, Denver, says in a
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dinos-and-early-mammals-romped-nasas-doorstep-180968023/#pTqBW4MPtxAjOJpT.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment