A 100-million-year-old hunk of sandstone found in a NASA parking lot in Maryland preserved dozens of dinosaur and ancient mammal footprints, officials said Wednesday.
The sandstone was spotted in 2012 by Maryland resident and dinosaur expert Ray Stanford, 79, while dropping his wife off at work at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
Mr. Stanford knew sandstone was a common place to find preserved prints and parked his car to get a closer look, according to a press release from the agency. He found a 12-inch-wide print from a nodosaur — a large, armored dinosaur — almost immediately. What he didn’t expect was what the team of paleontologists would find with him afterwards, he said.
“We’re looking at the largest known slab that has animal tracks on it from anywhere in the world,” said paleontologist Martin G. Lockley during NASA Goddard’s video of the slab’s excavation.
Dr. Lockley co-authored a paper in Scientific Reports on the sandstone prints with Mr. Stanford, his wife Sheila Stanford, and others that published Wednesday morning.
Together the team identified 100 prints from at least 70 different mammals and dinosaurs, likely made within a few hours of each other and then sealed by a flood. Mr. Stanford described it as a “time machine” because it acts like a snapshot of one, prehistoric day.
Among the finds are a baby nodosaur footprint near his original, full-size nodosaur print, as well as the following: a print from a long-necked herbivore known as a sauropod; small flying reptiles called pterosaurs; and theropods, which resembled small velociraptors. There were also 26 different small mammal prints scattered across the slab, leading the research team to believe the mammals and dinosaurs were feeding.
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