Walking with DINOSAURS--Follow Their Tracks at Denver's Dinosaur Ridge

摘要

Had real-estate agents been around 95 million years ago, they could have listed a lot of prime, beachfront properties near what is now Denver, Colorado. At the time, the region around Denver was on the edge of the Western Interior Seaway, a large, shallow body of warm water that divided the North American continent. The beachfront property that existed back then seems to have been quite popular-at least among dinosaurs, thousands of which migrated along this ancient shoreline. Today, the lithified sediments of this Cretaceous shoreline form the slickrock on the eastern slope of Dinosaur Ridge, a steeply tilted "hogback" just 12 miles west of downtown Denver and minutes from the Morrison exit of Interstate 70. Although the dinosaurs are long gone, they did leave their mark: a concentration of more than 300 well-preserved impressions that make up one of our nation's largest dinosaur trackways. With its easy roadside accessibility, the Dinosaur Ridge track site now attracts nearly 100,000 visitors each year.