Cryptomundo » Ancient Mammal Tracks Discovered

Ancient Mammal Tracks Discovered

Posted by: Loren Coleman on July 23rd, 2009

(Dinosaur National Monument)

This photo provided to the AP on July 23, 2009, by the Dinosaur National Monument, near Vernal, Utah, shows a small fossil mammal footprint, no bigger than a dime. Hundreds of tiny footprints left by mammals some 190 million years ago have been found on a canyon wall in a remote part of Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border, park officials said.

The tracks are a rare find, mostly because they were left at a time when the area was a hostile, vast Sahara-like desert where towering sand dunes seldom preserved signs of animal life.

Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument, and paleontologist George Engelmann of the University of Nebraska at Omaha spotted the tracks July 8 while scouring the area for fossils and other evidence from the early Jurassic period. Dinosaur National Monument, founded because of its rich and plentiful supply of dinosaur bones, straddles the Utah-Colorado border.

Most of the tracks are the size of a dime or smaller. A few include impressions of up to four toes. The mammals - perhaps the size of a rat - were among the few species that were able to survive between large sand dune fields where there was water, dinosaurs and a few plants, Chure said.

Interspersed among the mammal footprints are tracks from larger animals, possibly small dinosaurs, Engelmann said.

It might have been some kind of small mammal like Maastrichtidelphys meurismeti.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Cryptotourism, Extinct, Footprint Evidence, Fossil Finds. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.

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9 Responses to “Ancient Mammal Tracks Discovered”

CryptoInformant 2.0 responds: July 24th, 2009 at 1:00 am
This is certainly an interesting find, at least to me, given that I have been interested in prehistoric life much longer than I have been interested in cryptozoology. The tracks shown in the pictures seem pretty well preserved - no worse than many Sasquatch tracks.
shumway10973 responds: July 24th, 2009 at 10:36 am
(hand raised) I’ve got a question, teacher….How do they know it was a mammal? Really all they can say for sure is that some really, really small creature ventured thru when the environment was right for its foot prints to be preserved. Although, that is quite small. I would probably miss that one.
cryptidsrus responds: July 24th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Good question, Shumway10973. You’re a good “pupil.”

Had not thought of that myself. Tiny dinosaur, maybe???

Gotta sit next to you in the classroom from now on.
CryptoInformant 2.0 responds: July 24th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Shumway - Well, the shape of the print is one indicator - dinosaurs that small usually have three-toed, birdlike tracks.
DWA responds: July 26th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
shumway 10973: GREAT question, and one that leaped into my mind the moment I saw the photo.

CI 2.0: Yes, but. All we have is that impression - one many wouldn’t have recognized as a track - and some others that I presume were no better because this is the one that got photographed. And look at the leap that’s made.

Just given some other track evidence I could talk about here but won’t (but CI does ), I just find it funny, that’s all. Way funny.
CryptoInformant 2.0 responds: July 26th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
DWA - Well, animals tend to follow certain patterns with their track shapes - mammals that were around then tended to have blunter toes than those of dinosaurs of comparable size and, also, were not bipedal, whereas any adult dinosaur capable of making a track this small would almost certainly be a biped. Given these things we know about tracks from this time period, and especially the fact that we know at least one species of mammal capable of making a track like this was in the area the track is from in the general time range it is from, I don’t see the identification of it as a mammal track as too much of a leap.
DWA responds: July 27th, 2009 at 8:21 am
CI: yes, but.

I think - not getting into that topic on this thread - that you know why I think this is funny. At least your post hints at it.

It is hard to remember sometimes that everything we ‘know’ about prehistoric animals is speculation. Educated, fine. But speculation nonetheless.
CryptoInformant 2.0 responds: July 29th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I’m not sure “speculation” is the right term, DWA - I see speculation as the act of pulling something out of a hat and waving it around in the air yelling “I caught one! I caught one!”.
Whatever you want to call it, what paleontologists generally do with behavioral issues and the such is to take a long, hard look at the tag that gives detailed instructions on how to wash the hat, pulling something out of the hat, and saying, “Does that look like a polar bear to you?”. Still has a good chance of being wrong, but at least it looks like they’re doing something scientific.

(As for stuff like footprints, that’s not speculation - they have the foot, and they have the print. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that a foot with three toes will make a three-toed track [though it did take a few to figure out what the absence of tail-drag marks meant for the theory that dinosaurs walked around dragging their tails].)
DWA responds: July 29th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
CI: guess I’m saying “knowledge” is having the mammal in your hand; skinning it, there’s the skeleton; there it is, and here are some tracks at the end of which we found one, that look like those feet…

In this sense, we speculate, not know, because we never had the real actual animal in front of us. (When they can’t even but speculate on the species, they don’t have the foot.) I’m not complaining about the conclusion. Educated speculation is fine by me. Sure beats saying: it’s just impressions in a rock, could be anything. Just that the incredulity that attends some other things (at which you hinted) for which by comparison we have a lot of evidence I find, well, funny.

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