Come see the dinosaur footprints from Culpeper, Manassas, and New Mexico.
It may be surprising to residents of Northern Virginia, but dinosaurs once
walked the land not too far from where the USGS now has its National Center
[today]. Entombed through the years under millions of tons of hardened siltstone,
dinosaur tracks were uncovered in 1989 by the Culpeper Stone Co., which operates
a quarry near Culpeper, Va., 75 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The collection
is one of the largest groups of dinosaur tracks ever found in the world.
Over 2,000 tracks were found and mapped on the 6-acre quarry floor, 200 feet below the surrounding Virginia countryside. The tracks date back 208 million years, near the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs that left the tracks lived in an arid region, near a lake that might have been formed by the melting of winter snows in the then young, 20,000-foot tall Appalachian mountains.
The Culpeper Stone Co. saved the best tracks by using diamond-bladed saws
to cut slabs out of the rock. The slabs were given to the Smithsonian Institution,
the USGS, and the Virginia Museum of Natural History. A 2,200-lb. rock slab
containing footprints from the Kyantipus Minor is on display at the
USGS National Center in Reston, Va. The Kyantipus Minor is one of the
earliest theropods (two-footed carnivorous dinosaurs).
To help relate this local dinosaur to one that is commonly known there is a cast from a Tyrannosaurus rex footprint discovered by USGS scientists in 1992 while working in New Mexico. The Tyrannosaurus rex that made this footprint existed about 67 million years ago.
