Origins

[MSC290]

An ancient hill where you can touch thousands of dinosaur footprints

http://io9.com/5730242/an-ancient-hill-where-you-can-touch-thousands-of-dinosaur-footprints

1-11-2011 - io9



In Sucre, Bolivia, a limestone wall rises at an angle above the ground, its surface criss-crossed with thousands of dinosaur tracks. It's the biggest collection of dinosaur footprints in the world. How did these 68 million-year-old prints wind up here?

Photo by Leslie Middlemass

The truly strange thing is that the wall wasn't discovered until the mid-1990s, when workers from a nearby cement factory saw it. According to Atlas Obscura:

It's unclear how the wall went undiscovered for so long, as it is filled with more than 5,000 tracks made during the second half of the Cretaceous period about 68 million years ago. There are so many tracks, actually - and they're placed in such strange patterns - that scientists refer to the area as a dinosaur dance floor.

So far, six different types of dinosaur prints have been identified. One special track that measures 347 meters is the longest dinosaur trackway ever discovered and was made by a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex nicknamed "Johnny Walker" by some of the local researchers.

Eight other limestone walls with dinosaurs tracks have been found in the region. Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth, this area was part of a huge shallow lake. The tectonic plate shifts during the Tertiary period that formed the great Andes Mountains also pushed some of these limestone walls out from the bed of the lake. The rock cliff measures about 325 feet tall and juts into the sky at a 70 degree angle.