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Ray Stanford: This part on my right was the part that was sticking above

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the ground when I made the discovery and I recognized

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immediately that we’re looking at a large footprint of a armored dinosaur, a Nodosaur.

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And, it was not until we excavated the

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dirt out of the back of it that we realized a baby dinosaur had stepped in it; and a lot of other

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activity was going on. Martin Lockley: We’re looking at

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the largest known slab that has mammal tracks

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on it from anywhere in the world. I know of about four or five sites

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in the whole age of dinosaurs that have mammal tracks and some of them only have one or

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two and here we’ve got approximately a hundred footprints on it. It’s amazing!

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Well this whole area here, is very, very, interesting

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because we have these nice five toed tracks, theirs actually

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a pair here. So we have a left and a right, and as mammals

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we have five fingers and five toes, and so these are our

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cretaceous ancestors you might say. For a comparison

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you could look at this track, it has three toes and that

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is just typical of a modern bird, or the ancestor

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of a modern bird, which was a small theropod dinosaur.

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This one here is very small, it’s the size of

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a squirrel track and has its toes going in this direction.

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Ray Stanford: I find this very exciting because of the kind of details we can see.

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And see how sharp these claws were. Martin Lockley: What's special about this

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track is that it is the largest mammal track on this surface and

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indeed it’s the largest mammal track known from the age of dinosaurs.

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During the age of dinosaurs we’ve traditionally regarded most

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mammals as the size of rodents, rats, and squirrels and so forth.

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It is very rare to find anything this big. I mean this was an animal that was

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maybe the size of a badger. This was a big animal by mammal standards from the

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age of dinosaurs.

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Ray Stanford: What excites me about this slab found at Goddard Space Flight Center,

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is that this shows us the actual life in action

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of all this incredible diversity. From the flying reptiles,

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to the large dinosaurs, to the very small or tiniest

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perhaps dinosaurs. And three, four, five types of

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mammals. In fact, it shows us not the dead

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but life is almost like a time machine. We can look across

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I guess, maybe two weeks of activity of animals

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and we can almost picture it unlike if we were just looking at bones.

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We see the interaction, how they pass in relationship to one another.

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So what we have here from Goddard, is looking

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deeply into ancient time on the Earth, and I think it's just tremendously

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exciting.

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