Great Secrets of Our National Parks
Some of the best findings by accidental anthropologists and studied experts.
Categories: Featured Travel Stories , Photo Gallery
By: TW Editors 06/01/2008
Denali National Park, AK
Jurassic Park
I remember hiking in the desert near my high school in Arizona, looking for igneous and metamorphic rocks, as my geology teacher called out a list of rocks to collect: obsidian, basalt, rhyolite, slate, quartzite.
When I asked “Like this one?” I didn’t get quite the response Susi Tomsich did when she popped that question during her Department of Geology and Geophysics field camp on June 27, 2005.
Her professor, Dr. Paul McCarthy at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, was rattling on about sedimentary rocks that preserved dinosaur tracks when she pointed out to him a six-inch wide, nine-inch long track that turned out to be a 70-million-year-old footprint of a three-toed Cretaceous period dinosaur.
Now that’s some rock!
Her discovery was the first evidence of dinosaurs found inside Denali National Park in Anchorage, Alaska. You can see this track at the Murie Science and Learning Center near the park’s entrance.
Since her finding, other tracks have been uncovered at the park, including those of theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs that walked on their hind legs) and hadrosaurs (duck-billed vegetarian dinosaurs).
Let’s hope nobody clones those bad boys out of amber-trapped DNA.
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