A Dinosaur Footprint Hunter's Guidebook

February 20, 2008

Dinosaur footprint hunter Ray Stanford has found over 900 Cretaceous era animal tracks right in the vicinity of the Discovery Channel headquarters. Washington D.C. likely also was once teeming with dino life, with over a dozen species alone located in nearby Maryland.

If you'd like to test your skills at finding fossilized dinosaur footprints, here are some suggestions from Stanford:

1. Start by reading a good book on the subject. He recommends books by Dr. Martin Lockley, such as Tracking Dinosaurs: A New Look at an Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

2. "Focus on what the site has to offer, instead of looking for specific types of footprints," Stanford advises. "You'll probably be surprised by what you find."

3. Stream beds that have suffered recent erosion, such as from human activities or storms, may yield footprint-containing rock, or what are called "floats" by geologists and other rock hounds. Floats are pieces of track-bearing substrate that hydrodynamically dislodged from their natural stratigraphic context during stream bank flooding.

4. According to eHow, good places to start looking are Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut; Holyoke, Massachusetts; Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas; or Mill Canyon/Copper Ridge Dinosaur Tracks in Utah.

5. If you are in the Colorado area, consider joining the Dinosaur Trackers Research Group at the University of Colorado at Denver.

6. Study existing dinosaur tracks. Here are a few of Stanford's:

7. Finally, for a less adventurous, but no less interesting, hunt, check out your local natural history museum. The Smithsonian and other museums, for example, house impressive dino tracks.