When storms hit central Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, dry
washes turn to muddy streams, scouring the limestone bedrock. In
one gully near the Red Gulch/Alkali Backcountry Byway, the yearly
floods uncovered more than 2,000 dinosaur tracks from the Middle
Jurassic period. “There were thousands and thousands of small- to
medium-sized meat-eating dinosaurs scurrying around here,” explains
Brent Breithaupt, a University of Wyoming paleontologist who is
studying the tracks. Until the tracks’ discovery in 1997, most
experts believed that Wyoming had been underwater 165 million years
ago. Now the site will “rewrite the history of the Middle Jurassic
in this part of world,” Breithaupt says, since dinosaurs must have
lived at the edge of a great inland sea. The tracks draw many
dinosaur buffs, including visitors who damaged several prints in
early September while making illegal plaster
casts.
Later this fall, the Bureau of Land
Management will release an environmental assessment of the site;
meanwhile, the agency welcomes suggestions about managing the area.
Send comments to Bob Ross, Bureau of Land Management, P.O. Box 119,
Worland, WY 82401. The tracks are featured on the Wyoming BLM’s Web
site at http://www.wy.blm.gov. – Gabriel
Ross
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline They left only footprints.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
