WASHINGTON 鈥� Ray Stanford was dropping his wife off at work in Maryland in 2012 when he saw an intriguing rock formation. In a paper released Wednesday, scientists are saying his find led to one of the most important discoveries ever in聽paleontology.
Stanford, a dinosaur track expert from the D.C. area, was bringing his wife to her job at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, when he found what turned out to be a single dinosaur track from the Cretaceous era.
That led to an excavation that revealed exceptionally preserved body fossils聽and more than 70 dinosaur and mammal tracks聽from eight species 鈥� all displayed on a slab 8 feet by 3 feet.
“When I realized what was on this slab, it took me about three nights to get three hours of sleep,” Stanford told 海角精品黑料. “No one聽had ever seen聽this many classes of animals interacting with each other and in a small environment of only about two square meters of space.”
鈥淭he concentration of mammal tracks on this site is orders of magnitude higher than any other site in the world,鈥� Martin Lockley, paleontologist with the University of Colorado Denver, a co-author of聽, said in a .
The tracks depict聽Stanford’s initial discovery 鈥� the聽tank-sized, plant-eating, armor-plated nodosaur. But there are also the footprints of small flying reptiles commonly known as pterodactyls,聽foot prints of small squirrel- and badger-sized mammals and crow-sized predators聽related to velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex.
There are at least 26 mammal tracks.
Stanford said the way the tracks intertwine and are spaced suggest聽the flesh-eating dinosaurs were scoping out the area, looking for mammals to consume.
“Nowhere in the history of paleontology have we seen the actual mammals and the theropod interaction, where it seems one is waiting to eat the other,” Stanford said.
Other factors make the finding unique.
The great number of tracks on the slab is one of the highest track densities and diversities ever reported; it’s聽one of the largest collections of Mesozoic mammal footprints ever discovered, and the organic material in the former聽wetland setting created exceptionally preserved body fossil remains 鈥� there are no other similarly preserved fossils聽in the world.
The combination of the flood plain where the creatures left their tracks and the fine-grained red material in that plain is a unique environment.
“Fine grain is extremely important in getting good details in footprints and that’s what was existing here 110 million years ago,” Stanford said. “We don’t see this … anywhere else in the world.”
