Originally published at: A four-year-old girl discovered this perfectly preserved dinosaur footprint | Boing Boing
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@Leon_Glymph, Welcome to BoingBoing!
And the millions of dinosaur-enthralled preschoolers everywhere have a fit of envy, closely followed by squee!!
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Calling a 4-year old a ‘citizen scientist’ surely feeds the mill of distrust of science.
“Heck, if SHE’s a scientist, then I am too! Those Dominion machine were rigged - I heard a scientist say so!”
[shakes head]
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Pretty close to within a few million years. A variety of dating techniques are used.
It was not rock when the animal made the imprint. It was more likely clay that later petrified
The tracks would have been quickly covered and fossilized. Its probable that the overlying rock was softer and recently eroded away. Had this not been discovered recently it may have eroded away too within less than a year. Fossils are very rare and fragile, although trace fossils like these usually last longer.
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Pretty sure we’ve all seen this print before. The question is, does it start the reactor and what does the reactor do?
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Excerpt: For a track made tens of millions of years ago to survive until the present, several specific steps had to happen. The sediment the dinosaurs walked through needed to be just the right texture – not too soft and not too hard. Prints in very wet soil would collapse on themselves, and walking in hard soil didn’t make much of an impression. It also helped when the sediment that filled the tracks fell slowly and was a different type than the one on the ground. For example, falling ash drifting from a distant volcano would be a better preservative than a sudden mudslide burying an expanse of muddy tracks. And, of course, geological events must have combined in just such a way to make the tracks visible today. Dinosaur tracks have been found on every continent of the world except Antarctica, but they’re still comparatively rare.
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Sure, it’s a little silly. But in the list of reasons people believe conspiracy theories and doubt science, attempts to inspire kids to think of themselves as scientists whose observations of the world around them are important and unique is pretty low.
However, I believe that tradition dictates that this species of dinosaur must be named Wildersaurus, right?
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Rubbish, dinosaurs were really fucking heavy, that’s how they left footprints in stone!!
Maybe… 
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It would be awesome if this went on display after they are done studying it, with a plaque saying who found it. That would be an inspiration for other kids, not to mention quite a thing for young Lily to be able to go see.
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Why, it’s so easy, a…
I’m put in mind of one of Terry Gilliam’s short fill-in animations on MPFC wherein paleontologists, after evaluation, had reconstructed an entire woolly mammoth from the tip of a human thumb (the thumb tip being the tip of the mammoth’s trunk).
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