What Dinosaurs Left Behind
In the summer of 2000, two Canadian boys had the adventure
of a lifetime. As
8-year-old Daniel Helm and 11-year-old
Mark Turner of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, rafted
down a local creek, they saw a trail of evenly spaced depressions
in the rocks along the shore. Some of the depressions had
projections that looked like toes, but these were no ordinary
footprints. The same question flashed through both boys’
minds: Could these be dinosaur tracks laid down millions
of years ago?
It was a good question. Daniel and Mark had done their homework. They knew the rock beds along the creek were just the right age to contain ancient tracks, and they had spent most of their summer vacation looking for prehistoric prints. Had they finally found some?
Gathering
Data
The boys asked a local paleontologist to visit the site.
When the scientist confirmed that the impressions were
dinosaur footprints, Daniel and Mark were thrilled. They
spent the rest of their vacation carefully studying and
measuring the tracks. Then they sent all their data to
Rich McCrea, a dinosaur-track expert at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton.
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| Mark Turner (left), Daniel Helm, and the dinosaur tracks they discovered. |
McCrea was so intrigued by the boys’ work that he made a plan to visit the site at Tumbler Ridge the next summer. When McCrea saw the footprints up close, he was impressed by the tracks and by the boys who discovered them.
“The [boys] had just the right amount of imagination to see this stuff and recognize it for what it is,” McCrea told reporters.
Careful excavation of the site revealed a total of twenty-six footprints, along with something even more incredible—a dinosaur bone. McCrea could hardly contain his excitement.
“There are possibly half a dozen places in the world where dinosaur prints and bones occur together,” he said. “This is something I never expected to see.”
Two Kinds of Fossils
Like dinosaur bones, prehistoric footprints are fossils.
A fossil is any evidence of ancient life.
Body fossils—the bones and other remains of plants and animals—show what ancient life looked like. But they can’t tell scientists everything they’d like to know about the ancient world. Luckily, trace fossils can help fill in the gaps.
Trace fossils include footprints, skin imprints, droppings, urine holes, vomit, tooth marks, stomach stones, unhatched eggs, and animal homes. These traces of ancient life can tell scientists how dinosaurs moved and what they ate. They can also provide clues about how ancient creatures raised their young and what their social life was like.
When scientists combine what they learn from body fossils with clues they find in trace fossils, they can get a clearer picture of the ancient world.
The bone and trackway provided McCrea with all the information he needed to determine that an armored plant eater had made the footprints more than 95 million years ago. The size of the footprints suggested that the dinosaur was about 18 feet (6 meters) long and 4 feet (more than 1 meter) tall, and weighed about as much as a cow. The length of the dinosaur’s stride showed that the ancient ambler was walking slowly at the time it made the tracks. Its top speed was probably a little more than 1 mile per hour, or a bit less than 2 kilometers per hour.
Dinomania!
By the time McCrea left Tumbler Ridge, many local people
had become interested in fossil hunting. One of them, Al
Durand, found another trackway just a few hundred feet
upstream from the first footprints. The site had more than
two hundred footprints made by at least four different
kinds of dinosaurs.
But the discoveries didn’t end there. Over the next few years, scientists and citizens found many more trackways and unearthed more than three hundred dinosaur bones and other fossils. At the same time, local residents created the Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation and began setting up exhibits, offering tours of dinosaur sites, running a summer camp, and building a research center.
Today, scientists from all over the world visit
Tumbler Ridge. Each one hopes that by studying the area’s
treasure trove of fossils, he or she will learn something
new about ancient life on Earth. No one knows what incredible
discoveries these researchers might make in the future.
But what we do know is that none of their work would be
possible without the summertime explorations of two curious
boys.
A Treasure Trove
Many more discoveries were made in the Tumbler Ridge area
after Daniel and Mark found dinosaur tracks in the summer
of 2000. Fossils included
- more than three hundred dinosaur bones,
- skin impressions left by an ankylosaur,
- ancient turtles, fish, plants, and small sea creatures.
