A bit more than 110 million years ago, dinosaurs skipped through your backyard. They traipsed in the swampy woods and ran across what is now Greenbelt Road.
Maybe you already knew that.
Six years ago, Berwyn Heights dinosaur hunter extraordinaire Ray Stanford discovered a nodosaur footprint – “think of them as a four-footed tank,” Stanford said. The footprint was in an outcropping of sandstone next to a parking lot at Goddard Space Flight Center, just one dinosaur step away from our houses.
That discovery was all over the news in 2012. Coupled with the fact that the dinosaur park in Laurel is only 15 minutes from here, that means that many of us already knew that we live in what was once a dinosaur stomping ground.
What’s new, according to the January 31 article in Scientific Reports, is that the dinosaurs weren’t alone.
Stanford, his wife Sheila who works at Goddard, and several trained paleontologists studied the replicated rock for six years. They found a dinosaur parent and baby. They found three-toed dinosaur creatures that were the ancestors of birds. And, most surprisingly, they found mammals.
Read more of this story in the February 8 News Review
