While digging through Southern Utah for colored rock formations, a U researcher stumbled upon a field of dinosaur tracks that resemble a game of “Dance Dance Revolution.”
The multiple tracks, which spread across an area the size of a football field, are proof that the sand dunes of Southern Utah experienced periods of wet climates during the early Jurassic period, and that dinosaurs might have lived in a close-knit community near water.
Winston Seiler, a former geology graduate student, was walking near Vermilion Cliffs National Monument along the Arizona-Utah border when he stumbled across what resembles a dinosaur dance floor.
“The first time I saw it, I was intrigued and thought these might be dinosaur tracks,” Seiler said. “It’s very unusual to have so many of them, though.”
Marjorie Chan, chairwoman of the geology and geophysics department and Seiler’s adviser, reviewed the tracks and said she remembers seeing the tracks three years ago when a Bureau of Land Management ranger pointed out the unusual phenomenon. While they looked like potholes, it just didn’t seem quite right.
When Seiler said he thought it could be dinosaur tracks, she said a light came on in her head and she knew that’s what they had to be.
“Usually when you see dinosaur tracks, you don’t see them in such high densities,”
Chan said. “These tracks are telling us something about the social aspects of dinosaurs during this time.”
The sand dunes in Southern Utah resemble the Sahara Desert millions of years ago, but with so many dinosaur tracks grouped together and overlapping in some places, Seiler and other researchers said they believe the site could have been alongside a desert oasis.
The dinosaurs might have migrated to the area or lived there in a close-knit community with both herbivores and meat-eaters, Chan said.
Throughout the national monument, dinosaur tracks can be found sparsely located in various parts, but none indicate a community.
“These are all pieces of the puzzle,” Chan said. “There may have been some kind of a food chain supporting these big animals. There were insects and other smaller organisms in the area, but we don’t know what else exactly. It’s turning out that it’s a more complex environment than we thought.”
Seiler consulted some paleontology graduate students at the time of the discovery, including Terry Gates, who published a paper last year naming a toothy duck-billed dinosaur familiar to Utah.
Gates said paleontologists and other researchers have many questions to answer about the flat plane of tracks, including how long the dinosaurs were there and what the environment was like for them.
“(It’s) the million dollar question, and we don’t actually know what happened back then,” Gates said. “It’s really great preservation and shows that it was wet, (and) shows that the sand was pushed up around the foot when a dinosaur would step through.”
The tracks were found in the Navajo sandstone formation in Coyote Buttes Special Permit Area of the national monument, which restricts access to 20 people per day.
Seiler said people usually look at the multi-colored rocks and pass right by the dinosaur tracks without even realizing what they are. Seiler himself was studying the rock formations to try to notice patterns in the coloration when he noticed the unusual tracks.
The study was published in the October issue of the international paleontology journal Palaios, but Seiler said there are more questions to answer about the tracks.
“Were they feeding there, or was it just easier to walk through the wet, compacted sand?” Seiler asked.
Chan said a lot of paleontology researchers at the U are busy working on discovering and naming dinosaurs from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument right now, but the U is hiring a new paleontology professor and researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, who could look into it.
“(As geologists), what we do is look for clues in the record, like which way the wind was blowing or whether the environment was wet or dry,” Chan said. “Those clues tell us it was a desert environment. Future research might be able to tell us more about how the dinosaurs lived back then.”
University of UtahU researchers have discovered a large number of dinosaur tracks in the Navajo sandstone formation. The tracks are a further proof that there were ponds of water in the area during the Jurassic period.