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.

Four-legged tracks in mud cause paleontologists re-think

Muddy tracks left 397 million years ago may reset the age when the first four-legged animals crawled onto land.

In the Nature journal study, reported Wednesday and led by Grzegorz Niedz´wiedzki of Poland's Warsaw University, a European team reports "numerous" tracks from the Zachelmie mountain quarry that reveal the era when clumsy-limbed fishes forsook the seas to live on land.

The tracks show that four-legged creatures, one of them more than 8 feet long, probably originated in lagoons, not swamps, as suggested by past fossil finds.

A beach "provides a ready food source of stranded marine animals," the study's authors say. That would have allowed marine

ancestors of four-legged creatures to evolve "terrestrial competence" while dining on "a new and essentially untouched resource."

The trackway discovery "is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary and unexpected finds in paleontology for decades, perhaps a century," says paleontologist John Long of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Until the discovery, paleontologists thought the evolutionary transition from fishes to land animals was tightly nailed down to fossils dated about 379 million years old, he says.

The tracks not only push back the age of the first four-legged animals by a "whopping 18 million years," he says, but also "show that quite advanced kinds of tetrapods (four-limbed creatures), with incipient wrist joints, had already appeared by this much earlier stage of animal evolution."

The tracks "lob a grenade" into fossil studies of the earliest land creatures, Philippe Janvier and Gael Clement of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris say in a commentary accompanying the study.

Paleontologists had considered fish-like creatures such as "Tiktaalik," a discovery that made headlines in 2006, as the likely earliest land animals. Instead, the trackways suggest Tiktaalik was a relic species still adapting to land long after other species had made the transition.

Not so fast, Tiktaalik's discoverers say. "Trace fossils such as these presumed vertebrate tracks and trackways, however, are a notoriously difficult class of evidence to interpret with full confidence," says Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia by e-mail. "With all respect to the scientists involved in this study, there may be other explanations for these suggestive tracks."

The study authors acknowledge they have only fossil tracks, not bones, from their four-legged creature, which perhaps resembled an oversized salamander. Based on its gait, the critter floated in the tide while making tracks. The authors recommend from their finding that other paleontologists look for fossils of four-legged creatures as far back as 420 million years ago.