Tracks of a Running Bipedal Baby Brontosaur

Staff at the Morrison Natural History Museum have again discovered infant dinosaur footprints in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado, near the town of Morrison. Dating from the Late Jurassic, some 148 million years ago, these tracks were made before the Rocky Mountains rose, when Morrison was a broad savanna full of dinosaurs. The fossil tracks represent infant sauropods, according to discoverer Matthew Mossbrucker, the museum's director. Sauropods are giant, herbivorous long-necked dinosaurs, sometimes known as "brontosaurs." The sauropod Apatosaurus was first discovered in Morrison in 1877. As long as three school buses parked end to end, and weighing as much as eight Asian elephants combined, Apatosaurus is the largest dinosaur found in the Denver metro area.

The tracks are on permanent display at the Morrison Natural History Museum in the recently redesigned "Fossils of the Foothills" exhibition funded by Scientific and Cultural Facility District (SCFD) grants. For more information related to dinosaur fossils, visit dinosaurs.