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Theropod (perhaps Dilophosaurus)
tracks near Tuba City, Arizona
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My friend and fellow
children’s book writer Caroline Hatton saw these dinosaur tracks in March of
2016 when she was on a trip to Arizona.Tuba City is within the Painted Desert at the western edge of the Navajo Nation
Our guide’s name was Bertha. I
think. I’m not sure, because even though she was shouting, the wind was
screaming louder. It was blasting us—sandblasting us. Violent gusts slapped us
around, deafening, blinding, asphyxiating!
I had read about dinosaur tracks
off U.S. Highway 160, about five miles west of Tuba City, Arizona. Hand-painted signs showed
where to turn off the highway, park, and meet a guide. Tours were free and
donations appreciated. The minimal jewelry stands were empty because of the
dust storm.
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| Dinosaur trackway. Can you see the village near the mesa! Me neither. |
With the wind shaking the car and
the desert landscape visible only once in a while when dust didn’t fill the
air, getting a guide sounded better than wandering off into a sandstorm searching
for dinosaur tracks with no idea where to look.
Our guide walked a few steps away
from the car and pointed down. Three-toed footprints raced away and every which
way, deeply pressed into flat pink rock. The footprints had formed after the
dinosaurs walked in mud tens of millions of year ago, and the mud later
hardened and became rock. Fossil footprints fall in the category of trace
fossils or ichnofossils, as opposed to fossilized body parts.
The dinosaurs who left these
three-toed tracks belonged to a group called theropods, meat-eaters who walked on two legs. The best-known member
is T. rex (Tyrannosaurus rex) but there are many species. The dinos who had stomped all over the spot
where we now stood may have been Dilophosaurus.
Even experts can’t tell from the tracks because they do not have enough
information.
One set of tracks showed a pair of dinoraptors had
walked together, one bigger than the other, perhaps male and female.
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Tracks of small and extra small raptors—perhaps a mom and
baby?
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Another
pair was small and extra small, perhaps a mom and a baby. And then we came across a footprint with an extra toe.
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Four-toed dinosaur track
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“Four-toed tracks. Triceratops,” our guide said. Lines of tracks criss-crossed the
area.
As our guide moved on, she shared
how she grew up “there” (between us and a low plateau or mesa on the horizon,
where we could barely make out village dwellings during short bursts of
visibility). As a little girl, she walked past these tracks every day on her
way to the school bus stop. Her mom decided to find out what they were. After
she did, she started offering tours. Bertha came along and learned how to do
it, beginning at age five. And today Bertha’s five-year-old granddaughter
tagged along with us.
The interpretation of some features
was best left to the imagination. What were the stone balls embedded in the
rock: dinosaur egg yolks, other parts too fierce to mention, or mineral
formations?
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What could these be?
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My husband was smart enough to
protect the digital SLR camera from dust by keeping a clear shower cap over it
and taking photos through it.
I took the photos in this article
with an eight-year-old Canon Powershot that had long had sporadic difficulties
with the lens extension and retraction mechanism. The replacement cover for the
battery-and-chip compartment had recently become increasingly temperamental. I
kept my back squarely to the wind, the Powershot under my jacket, and tried to
minimize how long I whipped out the camera to snap photos.
But the adventure proved fatal to both
the lens mechanism and battery-compartment cover. A repair guru removed the
chip surgically to save the photos, then declared the camera defunct—uncleanable.
Too bad, but after all, no one knows how soon the camera would have croaked
anyway. So it is now extinct, just like the dinosaurs whose tracks we followed
in Arizona.
For more info:
See a
Dilophosaurus
skeleton and artist’s visions at
“Dilophosaurus!”
An exhibition narrated by its discoverer, the late Sam Welles, formerly a
professor at the University of California Museum of Paleontology:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/dilophosaur/intro.html
