Dinosaur and Mammal Tracks Found Together
In what is being called the mother lode of Cretaceous tracks, mammals, dinosaurs and pterosaurs left their prints in a table-sized rock.
Of all places: at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, a property representing the cutting edge of human technology, dinosaurs left their mark. Ray Stanford was dropping off his wife at work when he noticed an unusual rock outcrop. As an amateur paleontologist, he looked and saw a dinosaur track, so he began digging. Soon he had an 8′ x 3′ slab of rock that was covered with tracks of all kinds, one of the most densely-concentrated trackways in the world. Tracks of stegosaur and nodosaur were found, but that’s not all, Laura Geggel reports for Live Science:
Of the 70 prints, at least 26 belong to squirrel- and raccoon-size mammals, the researchers said. This finding is remarkable, they added, given that it’s incredibly rare to find fossilized trackways belonging to dinosaur-age mammals. Until now, there were only four scientifically named mammal trackways from the Mesozoic: one from the Jurassic period and three from the Cretaceous. (Just like with new species, researchers can give scientific names to animal trackways.)
A 4-inch-long (10 cm) track belonging to the raccoon-size mammal is the largest mammal print from the Cretaceous on record. Its size is surprising, given that most dinosaur-age mammals were the size of squirrels or prairie dogs, the researchers said.
How many museum displays show badgers and squirrels running under the feet of dinosaurs? The tracks had to be made within days at most to be preserved. They could have even been made on the same day. An embedded video shows Martin Lockley, a paleontologist from Denver, looking over the slab with discoverer Ray Stanford, pointing out which tracks are which, but neither of them mention how quickly tracks have to be buried to fossilize.
“The concentration of mammal tracks on this site is orders of magnitude higher than any other site in the world,” Lockley said. “This is the mother lode of Cretaceous mammal tracks.”
Evolutionists claim the rock is 110 million Darwin Years old. For such a relatively small slab, the number of species found is quite astonishing.
In addition to the baby and adult nodosaur prints, the researchers identified track marks from a long-necked sauropod, small theropods (mostly carnivorous, bipedal dinosaurs related to Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex) and pterosaurs, a group of flying reptiles that includes pterodactyls.
The report contains speculations about what the animals were doing, but there’s not much to go on, except for the fact that none of the tracks overlap. Was a predator chasing them? That speculation contradicts another one that the mammals were sitting on their haunches to eat (indicated only by some rear footprints that occur in pairs). Geggel titled her article, “Were Dinosaurs Having a Party Millions of Years Ago in NASA’s Backyard?” Whatever was going on, it’s not normal for everyday tracks to be fossilized like this.
Why not ask, “Were these creatures scrambling to get away from muddy water surging in, that covered their tracks before they could be eroded? That could explain the lack of overlap and the absence of bones of the animals. The animals were swept away by the surge, but the tracks were instantly covered.
Once again we see evolutionists surprised to find good-sized mammals with dinosaurs. The evolutionary date is 50 million years before the supposed extinction event. That’s multiple times the length of time they speculate that a wolf-sized animal evolved into a whale (estimated 9 million years), or a monkey evolved into a man (estimated 6 or 7 million years). Something’s rotten in the state of Darwinland.