70 Mammal, Dinosaur Footprints Found On Fossilized Slab Discovered At Goddard Flight Center
BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center may be Maryland's home to outer space, but it turns out it was also home to dinosaurs.
The discovery was first made in 2013, when Ray Stanford spotted a rock while dropping his wife off at work at Goddard.
"I found it. Where everybody at Goddard Space Flight Center was looking up, and I am looking down," he said.
Stanford had been interested in dinosaur tracks for years, and what he found at Goddard was a 100 million year old footprint from a nodosaur.
"And I thought, 'This is fantastic,'" he added.
Built like a tank, complete with armor plating, the nodosaur print turned out to be just the beginning.
More prints were found on the rock, including the footprint of a baby nodosaur following its parent, the prints of flesh eating dinosaurs the size of crows, and most surprisingly, the footprints of small, early mammals.
RELATED: Amateur Paleontologist Finds Dinosaur Footprint Near Goddard Space Flight Center
According to University of Colorado paleontologist Dr. Martin Lockley, "We really have more mammal tracks on this single slab then almost all of the mammal tracks from the age of dinosaurs."
Stanford doesn't view his find as something written in stone.
Instead he says, "It's like a time machine. A magical time machine. Bones don't tell you anything about the movement of life, but this shows you the inter-relationships of the animals."
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