Despite our general perceptions about Alaska, it really was a nice, balmy place a long, long, long time ago. Proof of that has been discovered in Denali National Park and Preserve, where paleontologists have found tracks left behind eons ago by both meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs.
Among the fossilized footprints found by Dr. Tony Fiorillo of the Dallas Museum of Natural History and his associates are those belonging to hadrosaurs, a duck-billed dinosaur species that some think meat-eaters preyed upon 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.
After two fossilized dino footprints were found in the park last summer, the researchers returned this summer and since early June have discovered 18 trace fossil sites spread between Igloo Canyon and Double Mountain. The largest of the tracks is roughly 20 inches by 20 inches.
Dr. Fiorillo has dubbed some of the track sites as "Cretaceous dance floors."
You can learn more about the research and find other pictures at this site.
More Dino Tracks Found in Denali
Published Date
August 7, 2006
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