Were Dinosaurs Having a Party Millions of Years Ago in NASA's Backyard?

[Judi Lynn]

By Laura Geggel, Live Science Senior Writer | February 2, 2018 03:24pm ET

About 110 million years ago, two tank-like dinosaurs — a baby and an adult — walked across what was a squishy wetland, leaving behind five-fingered handprints in what is now the backyard of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a new study finds.

These armored dinosaurs, known as nodosaurs, were in good company. A dinner-table-size sandstone slab that holds their fossilized prints also captured the trackways of other dinosaurs and ancient mammals that lived during the Cretaceous, the last period of the dinosaur age.

"It's a time machine," Ray Stanford, a dinosaur-track expert and amateur paleontologist, said in a statement. "We can look across a few days of activity of these animals, and we can picture it. We see the interaction of how they pass in relation to each other. This enables us to look deeply into ancient times on Earth. It's just tremendously exciting." [In Photos: Baby Stegosaurus Tracks Unearthed]

Stanford discovered the stone slab in 2012 while dropping off his wife, Sheila, at work at Goddard. A curious-looking rock outcrop on a hillside behind Sheila's building caught his eye. A closer look revealed a 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters) dinosaur track, and later excavations showed that the 8-by-3-foot (2.4 by 0.9 meters) slab contained about 70 track marks belonging to a medley of eight extinct dinosaur, pterosaur and mammal species.

More:
https://www.space.com/39582-dinosaur-footprints-found-at-goddard.html?utm_source=notification

[Canoe52]

1. Totally amazing! nt