Ray Stanford: This part on my right was the part that was sticking above
the ground when I made the discovery and I recognized
immediately that we’re looking at a large footprint of a armored dinosaur, a Nodosaur.
And, it was not until we excavated the
dirt out of the back of it that we realized a baby dinosaur had stepped in it; and a lot of other
activity was going on. Martin Lockley: We’re looking at
the largest known slab that has mammal tracks
on it from anywhere in the world. I know of about four or five sites
in the whole age of dinosaurs that have mammal tracks and some of them only have one or
two and here we’ve got approximately a hundred footprints on it. It’s amazing!
Well this whole area here, is very, very, interesting
because we have these nice five toed tracks, theirs actually
a pair here. So we have a left and a right, and as mammals
we have five fingers and five toes, and so these are our
cretaceous ancestors you might say. For a comparison
you could look at this track, it has three toes and that
is just typical of a modern bird, or the ancestor
of a modern bird, which was a small theropod dinosaur.
This one here is very small, it’s the size of
a squirrel track and has its toes going in this direction.
Ray Stanford: I find this very exciting because of the kind of details we can see.
And see how sharp these claws were. Martin Lockley: What's special about this
track is that it is the largest mammal track on this surface and
indeed it’s the largest mammal track known from the age of dinosaurs.
During the age of dinosaurs we’ve traditionally regarded most
mammals as the size of rodents, rats, and squirrels and so forth.
It is very rare to find anything this big. I mean this was an animal that was
maybe the size of a badger. This was a big animal by mammal standards from the
age of dinosaurs.
Ray Stanford: What excites me about this slab found at Goddard Space Flight Center,
is that this shows us the actual life in action
of all this incredible diversity. From the flying reptiles,
to the large dinosaurs, to the very small or tiniest
perhaps dinosaurs. And three, four, five types of
mammals. In fact, it shows us not the dead
but life is almost like a time machine. We can look across
I guess, maybe two weeks of activity of animals
and we can almost picture it unlike if we were just looking at bones.
We see the interaction, how they pass in relationship to one another.
So what we have here from Goddard, is looking
deeply into ancient time on the Earth, and I think it's just tremendously
exciting.
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