MORRISON, Colo., June 4, 2023
/PRNewswire/ -- The landlocked state known for its towering Rocky
Mountains and sprawling plains once featured dramatically different
landscapes as seen in its geological formations. One of the more
astonishing prehistoric Colorado
sites is in Morrison
on Dinosaur Ridge.
The section of hogback on Jefferson County Open Space land is
where an ancient creek bed preserved in sandstone has been dubbed
Crocodile Creek. Visitors can explore the site from a newly
installed stairway and viewing platform, and from a paved roadway
with interpretive signs written by paleontologists.
Crocodile Creek provides a particularly good example of sea
level croc habitat in a now sloping dry tidal creek bed that has
uplifted to a 6,000-foot elevation. More than 90 million years ago,
fresh water flowed through this bed into what was then the
coastline of a large interior seaway. Today's stone layers have an
abundance of fossilized animal tracks including numerous parallel
claw marks.
"Crocodile tracks are one of the most common tracks in the
Dinosaur Ridge area, and in the Cretaceous-age Dakota Sandstone
generally," said Dr. Martin Lockley,
co-founder of the nonprofit Friends of Dinosaur Ridge, and
world-renowned ichnologist and professor emeritus at University of Colorado Denver.
"Crocs had four toes on their hind feet, but often we see only
the traces of the three longest toes," Dr. Lockley noted. "Often
swim tracks are aligned in one direction because crocs were
following a creek or moving with a current." The world's first
fossilized crocodile tracks ever scientifically named were found
near Golden, Colorado in the
1930s.
Today crocodiles can only be found in south Florida in the U.S. and are protected as a
threatened species. Crocs that once thrived in Colorado were smaller than full-grown crocs
living in Florida, which can reach
up to 20-feet in length.
"Based to the largest tracks we can infer that the larger
animals were 13-16 feet long," Dr. Lockley said. "Nonetheless,
the larger crocs would have been fearsome, top predators in these
habitats. Paleontologists think they would have ambushed
unsuspecting dinosaurs, birds, and other creatures that strayed too
close to the waterline."
Just south of Croc Creek visitors can see evidence of a dinosaur
lek where mating rituals, like some modern birds perform, left
theropod scrape marks in Cretaceous mud.
CONTACT: Kristen Kidd,
3036816510, kristen.kidd@dinoridge.org
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SOURCE Friends of Dinosaur Ridge