In Alaska's Denali National Park, a large, multi-layered rock structure
with marks going back around 70 million years has been dubbed the "Coliseum"
site of dinosaur tracks.
The location, which was initially found in 2010, has been investigated by a
group of US experts and is home to an amazing collection of dinosaur
footprints.
There is evidence for a wide variety of dinosaur kinds and species,
including
ornithopods,
ceratopsids, and
theropods. That is evidence of how busy this location, which was probably a drinking
establishment on a sizable flood plain, would have been throughout the
years.
The rocky outcrop has a total size of around 7,500 square meters (80,729
square feet), making it somewhat larger than a regular soccer field. It is
roughly the height of a 20-story structure and has tracks strewn throughout
all of its flatirons.
According
to paleontologist Dustin Stewart, who oversaw the study while working at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks, "It's not just one level of rock with tracks
on it."
"It is a chronological series. There were other known track sites in Denali
before, but none of this size.
The Coliseum cliff's base first just appeared to have a trackway, but
scientists quickly discovered other marks. The tracks are a combination of
imprints left in soft mud that were later covered over by solid material and
imprints that survived after being later filled in by silt.
Paleontologist Pat Druckenmiller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks
comments, "They are beautiful." "You can see the skin's texture and the toes'
shape."
The
Alaska Range
was formed by the folding and tilting of the earth caused by the tectonic
plates progressively pressing against one another and buckled over millions
of years.
Furthermore, the location has produced more than just a treasure of
dinosaur footprints; it has also produced fossilized plants, pollen grains,
and remnants of freshwater mussels and crustaceans. It's Alaska's biggest
known site of its kind.
With adjacent ponds and lakes, this region would have been bustling with
life during the
Late Cretaceous. With coniferous and deciduous tree forests, the climate would have been
warmer and more similar to that of the Pacific Northwest than Alaska.
Sites like this may provide us with an insight into that era and what life
was like, and according to the experts, there is still "a lifetime" of
investigating to be done in the park. In the future, we may anticipate
hearing a lot more from these scholars.
It was covered in trees and teeming with dinosaurs,
according
to Druckenmiller.
"A tyrannosaur that was several times the size of the largest brown bear
there at the time was roaming about Denali. Raptors were present. Reptiles
could fly were present. Birds were present. An wonderful environment existed
there.
The research has been published in
Historical Biology.
