Spectacular dinosaur stomping grounds discovered just outside D.C.

January 31, 2018 4:15 AM

Some 110 million years ago, in the swamp that would become the Washington suburbs, a hulking, armored nodosaur trudged along a riverbank, leaving a telltale print in the mud. Offspring scrambled after it, while nearby, a long-necked sauropod squelched through the muck. . . . Millennia passed, an asteroid struck, the continents shifted, sea levels fell, mammals rose, humans climbed down from trees and launched toward the stars. Finally, on a summer day in 2012, a self-taught fossil hunter named Ray Stanford noticed the unmistakable shape of the nodosaur’s track

Bonus dinosaur news: Scientists discover 'the Holy Grail of dinosaurs' in Africa

posted by Westringia F. (15 comments total)

Insert requisite average age of senators comment here.
posted by fairmettle at 4:33 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

You're saying the swamp was already drained?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 4:52 AM on January 31, 2018 [10 favorites]

You're saying the swamp was already drained?

You owe me a new keyboard due to coffee atomization damage...

I love visiting the Goddard Space Flight Center, where this happened (I have several friends working there, mostly on robot-arm type projects, so I visit roughly once every 2-3 months). I probably passed by it several times without having a clue. I desperately wish I had known about it during one of my trips between discovery and when it was removed, so I could have taken a look.
posted by mystyk at 5:01 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yeah :) I think the thing I love most about this is the location -- there's something kinda poetic about going from dinosaurs to space flight all in the same little spot.
posted by Westringia F. at 5:04 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]

There's something touching about the palaeontologists and astrophysicists meeting like that and admiring each other's work.
posted by Harald74 at 5:11 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]

Just assumed they were talking about Loudoun County there.
posted by Naberius at 5:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

Alternative:
in the swamp that would become the Washington suburbs

So, the Washington suburbs?
posted by 1adam12 at 7:44 AM on January 31, 2018

this was wonderful, thanks for posting.
posted by namewithoutwords at 8:34 AM on January 31, 2018

> There's something touching about the palaeontologists and astrophysicists meeting like that and admiring each other's work.

Especially considering that, given how utterly tribal we humans can be, one could imagine a world where the dinosaur aficionados would hold a bit of a grudge against the astro-philes over a certain asteroid...

I also kind of love the fact that both parties are looking at things that happened hundreds of millions of years ago: one by looking up, and the other by looking down.
posted by Westringia F. at 8:51 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

a hulking, armored nodosaur trudged along a riverbank, leaving a telltale print in the mud.

Howard Taft was "here"
posted by clavdivs at 10:59 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

You don't even have to leave the capitol hill neighborhood to find dinosaurs. No pun there, they actually found a new species on the street now known as Capitalisaurus Court.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/capitalsaurus-court
posted by Skwirl at 1:05 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Prophetic bones, indeed.
posted by Twang at 1:35 PM on January 31, 2018

Orientation of the footprints show that they were they on their way into Cannon, Longworth and Rayburn, I guess
posted by GhostRider at 5:01 PM on January 31, 2018

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Something about that part of the Chesapeake basin is good for fossilized dinosaur prints, with lots discovered in the D.C. area. When I was a young kid there was a particularly good set discovered in a quarry in Northern Virginia, and there's family photos of me and a friend goofing around by them when we went to see them with my dad. It was pretty cool to get to walk around actual dinosaur tracks, in situ where they were found.
posted by biogeo at 6:42 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

As a somewhat compulsive scanner of the ground when I walk, I love stories of people finding things in or on the ground just by looking down. I asked my parents to take me places just to go fossil-hunting and rock-hunting as a kid. Great stories!
posted by limeonaire at 9:06 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]