Dinosaur Footprint Found At NASA's Goddard Campus

Dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford describes the cretaceous-era nodosaur track he found on the Goddard Space Flight Center campus this year.

About 112 million years ago, a plant-eating dinosaur, known as nodosaur, roamed what is now NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, leaving a huge footprint in the Cretaceous mud that came to notice only this summer.

On Friday, Aug. 17, dinosaur tracker and paleontologist, Ray Stanford shared the location of the footprint, which the dinosaur made with its back left foot, with Goddard's facility management.

The footprint, sticking out of the grass, was similar to that of an elephant and was nearly 14 inches wide.

Although NASA officials accepted the discovery as an authentic dinosaur footprint for the time being, they said that they'd be calling in experts to confirm the find and search the area for other evidence.

"This was a large, armoured dinosaur," Stanford said. "Think of it as a four-footed tank. It was quite heavy, there's a quite a ridge or push-up here

Subsequently the sand was bound together by iron-oxide or hematite, so it gave us a nice preservation, almost like concrete." Stanford said that nodosaurs were like "four-footed tanks."

They grew thick, spiky armour knobbed with big "nodes." They used to browse vegetation and crouched down low to protect themselves from toothy attacks.

Stanford has had a number of papers published, which include the discovery of a new species of nodosaur from a fossilized hatchling that was found near the University of Maryland in College Park.

The nodosaur that made the huge footprint at Goddard probably belonged to the early Cretaceous period and could be 15 to 20 feet long.

The Cretaceous Period ran between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, and was the last period of the Mesozoic Era.

Stanford also identified and presented several smaller footprints - three-toed, flesh-eating therapods - to Goddard officials from the same site.

"Space scientists may walk along here, and they're walking exactly where this big, bungling heavy armoured dinosaur walked, maybe 110 to 112-million years ago," Stanford said.

Smallest Dinosaur footprints

ONLY just hatched and new to the world, the little guy who left these prints in the riverbed was probably running for its life. Barely 10 centimetres tall, the hatchling would have been the length of a wren and easy prey for pterosaurs and other hungry dinosaurs.

The prints are the tiniest dinosaur footprints ever found. They were left between 125 and 110 million years ago, are just 1.27 cm and 1.51 cm long, and clearly show soft foot pads and three pointed claws.

Kyung Soo Kim of Chinju National University of Education in Jinju, South Korea, says the baby track-maker was a cousin of the fearsome T. Rex and belonged to the theropod sub-order, which includes tyrannosaurs.

"It was running to hide right after hatching," Kim speculates. It had plenty of reasons to do so: nearby tracks show it shared its home with fleet-footed, meat-eating dromeosaurs, such as Velociraptor, together with other dinosaurs, pterosaurs and shorebirds.

The prints were discovered in 2008 during the construction of a reservoir on Changseon Island, located 320 kilometres from the South Korean capital of Seoul.