Dinosaur tracker unearths big surprises

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ray Stanford pulls into the lot of a fast-food restaurant in College Park and parks at the back. Wearing high rubber boots and carrying a backpack, he makes his way through the brush and down to a stream bank littered with cups and wrappers.

He has come to track dinosaurs.

Mr. Stanford, a 69-year-old Texan, has been combing Maryland streambeds for evidence of dinosaurs for the past 13 years. The result is an unprecedented collection of footprints left behind 112 million years ago, found in an area where none had been reported before.

Mr. Stanford is far from a conventional scientist, and his lack of formal training — he has a high school diploma — is just the start. He also enjoys pursuing reports of UFOs, or "anomalous aerial objects" as he prefers to call them.

Mr. Stanford has found hundreds of dinosaur tracks in the suburbs of the District and Baltimore. They reveal an extraordinary diversity of animals living in one place during the early Cretaceous period, about twice the variety previously seen from that geological period. He also has found the fossilized remains of what he and a Johns Hopkins University paleontologist think is a previously unknown species, a discovery he lovingly calls "Cretaceous roadkill."

"I just find things," Mr. Stanford said. "I don't know why."

The discoveries have earned him the respect of the scientific establishment, despite his background. He has collaborated with people who have doctorate degrees and is working with the Smithsonian Institution to find a permanent home there for his collection.

Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is used to getting calls from people who think they have found dinosaur eggs or footprints. More often than not, they are mistaken.

Mr. Stanford was different. "He didn't show me anything that I didn't think was a footprint," Mr. Carrano said.

Mr. Stanford made his first dinosaur discovery in 1994, while looking for American Indian artifacts with his teenage children. Having read about dinosaurs, he spotted something that looked remarkably like a track. A few weeks later, he saw something similar. At first he assumed they were just random patterns that looked like tracks. But he kept thinking about them.

"Ray, how hardheaded can you be?" Mr. Stanford recalls thinking one day. "Those are iguanodon tracks."

David Weishampel, a Johns Hopkins paleontologist who plans to publish a paper with Mr. Stanford, says just the number of tracks Mr. Stanford has found is mind-boggling. "It's like, why didn't we see it before?" he said.

Mr. Stanford chalks it up to "the birder phenomenon." A person who badly wants to spot a particular rare bird may be unsuccessful for years, but once they spot it, they will then see it many times thereafter.

One outside factor has made tracks easier to spot in recent decades: the region's building boom.

Rapid development has led to more stream runoff. That, in turn, speeds up erosion and dislodges underlying rocks where the footprints are embedded.

Mr. Stanford has impressed paleontologists with his ability to identify and interpret tracks, in addition to his knack for spotting them.

As he shows a visitor around his living room, which is crammed with fossils, he launches into vivid stories about each track. He points out clues indicating what kind of dinosaur made the track and with which foot. He will note whether the animal was running, skidding or crouching, and often he will venture a guess about the circumstances.

"This guy was running," he says, picking up a fragment bearing two different footprints. "Now, we don't know that this was at the same time, but here is a larger, [flesh-eating] dinosaur. ...You could almost think that he might be running after this guy."

Though fascinated by UFOs since age 9, Mr. Stanford insists he is no "UFO buff." His goal, he says, is to apply scientific methods to learn about such phenomena.