Inside Denali National Park & Preserve, a dinosaurian discovery of historic proportions
Researchers are adding a massive track mapping to the collection of dinosaur relics found within the park
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers have reportedly discovered yet another treasure within the limits of Denali National Park and Preserve: a “dinosaur coliseum,” to include the largest single-track site ever recorded in Alaska.
“The true magnitude of the site wasn’t realized until we went there later,” said Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. “The lighting has to be just right. If the lighting isn’t right, we can’t see things.
“We got there at a time when we had some good light, and the site just lit up,” he said, “and we realized there were thousands of dinosaur tracks on this wall that’s 1.5 times the size of a football field.”
Druckenmiller, who helped author a formal paper on the project, said the site is a record of multiple species of dinosaurs, with the tracks said to be a mix of hardened impressions in mud and then casts of tracks that were created when the tracks were filled with sediment and then hardened.
The UAF team, including lead author of the paper and former UAF graduate student Dustin Stewart, also said there are fossilized plants, pollen grains and evidence of freshwater shellfish and invertebrates at the site. Together, the details are helping them put together what the entire environment in the area looked like millennia ago.
“It’s not just one level of rock with tracks on it,” Stewart told UAF, as shared in a press brief by the school. “It is a sequence through time.
“Up until now, Denali had other track sites that are known,” he said, “but nothing of this magnitude.”
Preservation of the site is of utmost importance, as is protecting it from disturbances such as vandalism and theft, so its precise location isn’t being shared publicly, but it is an area people could come across if going deep into the backcountry.
“Being able to record a diversity of both large- and small-sized plant- and meat-eating dinosaurs, it is truly a remarkable site,” Druckenmiller said. “It’s the sort of site that just adds further allure to this amazing piece of real estate we call Denali National Park.
“We do want to protect the resource at the end of the day,” he continued. “There’s not many places in the world that preserve such an amazing array of dinosaur fossils. So we want to be careful to protect those. At the same time, we want to share with people the kind of information that comes from the sites.”
Druckenmiller said the hope is that people are encouraged to explore for fossils but to leave sites in pristine condition so that others can appreciate them.
You can read the full research paper here.
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