Dino Dance Floor Found In Southwestern US
U.S. Scientists on the Arizona-Utah border have identified an amazing collection of dinosaur footprints.
Geologists have since dubbed the site "a dinosaur dance floor" due to the discovery of over 1,000 footprints found in the area.
The marks, found within the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, were long thought simply to be potholes gouged out of the rock by years of erosion.
The paleontology journal Palaios published a paper describing the 190-million-year-old footprints.
Professor Marjorie Chan from the University of Utah said getting out there and stepping in their footsteps feels like you are playing the game ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ that teenagers dance on.
"This kind of reminded me of that – a dinosaur dance floor – because there are so many tracks and a variety of different tracks."
"There must have been more than one kind of dinosaur there," she adds. "It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor."
The site records dinosaur movements around what was probably a watering hole during the Early Jurassic Period, when the US southwest was covered with a field of sand dunes larger than the Sahara Desert.
Experts said the site reveals at least four dinosaur species were present, with the animals ranging from adults to youngsters.
Winston Seiler, who worked on the project, said the different size tracks [2.5-50cm] might tell us that we are seeing mothers walking around with babies.
The site also records tail-drag marks, with some measuring up to seven meters in length.
The dinosaur prints were locked into sandstone after being covered by shifting dunes. They became exposed through erosion and will eventually disappear through erosion, scientists said.
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Image 1: Geologist Winston Seiler with some of the dinosaur tracks he identified for his thesis as a University of Utah master’s degree student. The impressions once were thought to be potholes eroded by water. But Seiler and Marjorie Chan, chair of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, published a scientific paper in the October 2008 issue of the journal Palaios identifying the abundant impressions as comprising a large dinosaur "trample surface" in northern Arizona. There are so many tracks they wryly refer to the site as "a dinosaur dance floor."
Image 2: University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks among hundreds of dinosaur footprints in a "trample surface" that likely was a watering hole amid desert sand dunes during the Jurassic Period 190 million years ago. The track site, which also includes some dinosaur tail-drag marks, is located in Coyote Buttes North area along the Arizona-Utah border.
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