Ancient Mammal Tracks Discovered

This photo provided to the AP on July 23, 2009, by the Dinosaur National Monument, near Vernal, Utah, shows a small fossil mammal footprint, no bigger than a dime. Hundreds of tiny footprints left by mammals some 190 million years ago have been found on a canyon wall in a remote part of Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border, park officials said.

The tracks are a rare find, mostly because they were left at a time when the area was a hostile, vast Sahara-like desert where towering sand dunes seldom preserved signs of animal life.

Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument, and paleontologist George Engelmann of the University of Nebraska at Omaha spotted the tracks July 8 while scouring the area for fossils and other evidence from the early Jurassic period. Dinosaur National Monument, founded because of its rich and plentiful supply of dinosaur bones, straddles the Utah-Colorado border.

Most of the tracks are the size of a dime or smaller. A few include impressions of up to four toes. The mammals – perhaps the size of a rat – were among the few species that were able to survive between large sand dune fields where there was water, dinosaurs and a few plants, Chure said.

Interspersed among the mammal footprints are tracks from larger animals, possibly small dinosaurs, Engelmann said.

It might have been some kind of small mammal like Maastrichtidelphys meurismeti.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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