With the 710 foot Glen Canyon dam rising above us to the right, tightly tucked between red sandstone walls that shunted the Colorado River southwest to the Grand Canyon, it would have been easy to overlook a single slab of rock beside the metal dock-way to our raft. But a student from Northern Arizona University waved me over and quietly pointed out the imprinted stone. “They don’t want people to know it’s there,” he whispered. It being the fossiled footprint of a three-toed dinosaur.
The 2009 discovery of another ornithopod-like fossil track way in the canyon may date the bird-footed herbivores to 25 million years earlier than previously recorded.
The Navajo sandstone of Glen Canyon is etched with histories of ancient people and creatures: primitive petroglyphs and prehistoric fossil prints, hidden and revealed over time as the water levels rise and fall.
Updated from July 7, 2010
