Dinosaur Track Discovery Indicates a Massive Herd

Paleontologists have discovered one of the most pristine patch of dinosaur tracks ever seen, and multitude of tracks indicates a massive herd roamed through Alaska 70 million years ago.

The track site was recently discovered in Alaska's Denali National Park and reportedly shows that a massive heard of duck-billed dinosaurs were gathering in the region.

"As I like to tell the park, Denali was a family destination for millions of years, and now we've got the fossil evidence for it," joked paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo, who took a break from studying the tracks to talk to Discovery News. "This is definitely one of the great track sites of the world. We were so happy to find it."

An initial study of the tracks was recently published in Geology and details how hadrosaurs - large duck-billed herbivores - not only live in extremely large "family" herds, but actually thrived in the ancient high-latitude, polar ecosystem.

Measuring and counting each class of track, the researcher found that 80 percent of the tracks were adults. The additional 13 percent proved adolescent, while 3 percent were juvenile and the remainder were partial prints.

According to co-author Yoshitsugu Kobayashi of Hokkaido University Museum, Japan, who initially stumbled upon the site with his team, the Denali tracks make up the largest track site seen in the northwestern part of the globe.

Aside from its impressive size and location, the tracks site also provided some interestingly clues about hadrosaurs and their ecosystem 70 million years ago.

"Many [tracks] had skin impressions, so we could see what the bottom of their feet looked like," Fiorillo said in a statement. "There were many invertebrate traces - imprints of bugs, worms, larvae and more - which were important because they showed an ecosystem existed during the warm parts of the years."

The study was published in Geology on June 30.