‘Irreplaceable’ dinosaur footprints damaged at Utah construction site, group says
More than 112 million years ago, a stretch of Utah was a muddy pit.
A shallow lake was drying up, and dinosaurs stomped through mud a foot deep, the Bureau of Land Management in Utah said.
Now more than 200 footprints have been discovered on one of the largest tracksites in the continent. But a conservation group is worried they’re getting destroyed.
The Center for Biological Diversity sent a cease and desist letter to the Bureau of Land Management’s Utah office on Jan. 31. They want the agency to immediately stop working near the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab, a popular tourist destination.
The tracksite was first reported to the bureau in 2009, and research began there a year later. It’s home to more than 200 fossilized footprints with up to 10 different kinds of tracks, according to the bureau.
“This site is the largest and most diverse tracksite known in the Cedar Mountain Formation,” the Bureau of Land Management said. “Collaborative research efforts indicate that the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite is one of the most significant Early Cretaceous tracksites in the world.”
People were concerned when the bureau started a construction project to replace an existing boardwalk near the tracksite. The project would remove the current wooden trail and replace it with colored concrete.
The agency planned to have construction trucks travel on a route feet from the walkway, and the “tracks would be rehabilitated” after the project was finished.
Over the weekend, however, people on social media posted photos that show a backhoe had driven over some of the fossilized dinosaur prints.
“The tire tracks are on the sauropod tracks,” conservationist Jeremy Roberts said on Twitter. “There is an iguanadon track there, too. They’re literally driving on these.”
The Center for Biological Diversity said the backhoe destroyed 30% of the resources at the site, according to informal surveys of the area.
“I’m absolutely outraged that the BLM has apparently destroyed one of the world’s most important paleontological resources,” Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the center, said in a news release. “This careless disregard for these irreplaceable traces of the past is appalling.”
The Bureau of Land Management told FOX 13 that it is “committed to balancing resource protection and public access” at the tracksite.
“The Moab Field Office is working to improve safe public access with an updated boardwalk that is designed to protect the natural resources of this site,” the bureau told FOX 13. “During that effort, heavy equipment is on location, but it is absolutely not used in the protected area.”
The tracksite is protected under federal law by the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009, according to the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau said it’s illegal to remove any fossils or deface the tracks.
This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 12:28 PM with the headline "‘Irreplaceable’ dinosaur footprints damaged at Utah construction site, group says."