Dinosaur Ridge, in Colorado, was a very hot site for finding dinosaur tracks in the late 1800s. After the scientists were through with it, it laid dormant for about 100 years, except for the occasional visitor. I think many people might have passed it without even knowing what it was. Sometimes new things can be found at old sites and this has been the case with Dinosaur Ridge. It seems that no one thought about looking under the boulders in the area for footprints that might be there. That was true until recently, when a beautiful set of fossilized footprints, made by an unknown dinosaur and a set of footprints made by a stegosaurus were found. This is the first set of stegosaurus footprints ever found in Colorado. These footprints were so good that one scientist looking at them stated that he felt that the animal just went by him. The first dinosaur footprints in the west were found in this area. This discovery may not be the last for this area as there are still some places that have not been fully explored. If you are ever in Dinosaur Ridge National Monument and see people turning over rocks, now you know why.

There are some very controversial dino tracks out there. What makes them so, is the fact that with all our scientific know how and ability to date things, we find that human footprints that are next to them seem to have been created at the same time. This would indicate that humans were around at the same time as dinosaurs. Not only that, but the footprints appear to be those of modern humans. How can this be when almost every scientist will tell you that man came along much later on the evolutionary scale? Could they be wrong? Why not, they have been wrong many times before.

St. George, Utah is place where a great set of dinosaur tracks were discovered. To be even more precise, they were found at the Johnson Farm. Dr. Johnson, an optometrist, was leveling a hill on his farm. While he was in the process of doing this, he hit some stone blocks. He decided to move them and turned one over. To his great surprise there was an impression on the underside of the block. When he examined it, he found that it was the impression of, what he believed was, a dinosaur footprint. He went to some of the other blocks and turned them over and found more footprints. The tracks, which were found in 2000, were the largest set of dinosaur tracks ever found. They dated back 200 million year or so. Some of the prints were of the largest dinosaur of the period, the Dilophosaurus which was over 19 feet long and stood on two legs. The fossils were formed because the area the Johnson farm occupies was formerly a lake front and the animals walked through the mud which hardened and preserved their tracks.

Dino Print
Photo Source: NPS

Utah is a popular place for finding dinosaur tracks. Another area with tracks which has been found is Wasatch Plateau in central Utah. Fossilized track beds have been found in this area that stretch for about 1,000 meters and are a little over 50 meters wide in some spots. These tracks are located on the south face of the North Horn Mountain.

Don't think that the only place that preserved dinosaur footprints can be found is in the midwest, that is far from the truth. These preserved tracks can even be found on the east coast, in such unlikely places as Connecticut. There is a formation, named the Portland Formation in Connecticut that shows the prints of dinosaurs from the early Jurassic Period. Here you can find prints from such animals as the Batrachopus, Anchisauripus, Otozoum, Eubrontes, Grallator, Anomoepusand and many others.

As strange is the fact that dinosaur tracks were found in Connecticut, I find it even stranger that they were also found in Newark, New Jersey. I know there is really nothing strange about this, but it just seems to blow my mind, I can't really say why. The Newark formation is named the Boonton Formation. It is made out of typical stone types that were once mud such as sandstone, siltstone and mudstone. These tracks are also from the early Jurassic Period. Many of these footprint are from similar animals to the ones listed about, since they are from the same period in time.

Another interesting formation of tracks is in New York and New Jersey and is known as the Lockatong Formation. These footprints are from, what is known as the Late Triassic Period. This means that they are about 220 million years old. The human race, if most scientists are right about our age, will be lucky to last as long as the dinosaurs did.

The east coast was home to dinosaurs for a long time. They lived in not only in the early Jurassic Period but much later. They probably lived here long before the early Jurassic Period also. The science of detecting evidence of dinosaurs, aside from finding bones or teeth, is called ichnology.

Why was everything so big back in the time of the dinosaurs? Why is everything so much smaller now? Could it be that nature, which is always adjusting things, adjusted all animal live so that it would consume much less food, thus allowing more animals and humans to live comfortably on the earth? Think of it this way, if we were all about three times bigger and all the animals and even insects were three times bigger and we ate three times as much, we would have probably wiped ourselves out by now or the population would have been much smaller. Nature is very smart in its own way.