ABSTRACT: Keeping Track of New Dinosaur Footprint Discoveries: Implications of a Rapidly Expanding Data Base

Martin G. Lockley, Kelly L. Conrad, R. Farley Fleming

In the 1980s, numerous new dinosaur footprint sites have been discovered worldwide. In the Colorado Plateau region (mainly Colorado, Utah, northern Arizona, New Mexico, and areas fringing the plateau), the CU Denver Dinosaur Trackers Research Group is attempting to catalog all known dinosaur tracksites and establish a database that will be useful and accessible to geologists and land management agencies. To date approximately 200 sites in this region are reliably located and documented to some degree. The data are being entered into a database program that will allow sorting by age, location, track type, stratigraphic unit, etc.

To date, the stratigraphic distribution of recorded Triassic-Cretaceous sites in this region area as follows: Triassic--Popo Agie Formation (4 sites), Chinle-Dolores Formation (8), Dockum Group (7), Jurassic--Wingate Formation (15), Moenave-Kayenta Formation (15), Navajo Formation (20), Carmel Formation (3), Entrada Formation (30), Morrison Formation (23), Cedar Mountain Formation (2), Dakota Group (21), Mesaverde Group (about 30), Laramie Formation (4), and Raton Formation (2).

When combined with the record of over 45 Cretaceous sites from Texas, and about the same number of predominantly Cretaceous localities from the north (mainly western Canada, but also Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho), we estimate that almost 300 sites are now known.

Footprint data from these sites provide new insights into the paleobiology of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic vertebrates. The data are also useful in fundamental geological and paleontological research concerning stratigraphy, depositional environments and the biasing of the fossil record. Several important sites have already been set aside for protection by the appropriate land management agencies.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91002©1990 AAPG Rocky Mountain Section Meeting, Denver, Colorado, September 16-19, 1990