Dinosaur Fossils & Footprints: Bolivia now Has Most Dinosaur Footprints on Earth
After the discovery of 5,000 new dinosaur footprints, the landlocked Latin American country of Bolivia can now boast the largest number of dinosaur prints in the world.
As reported in EFE, Elizabeth Baldivieso, the director of the Bolivian dinosaur exhibition Cretaceous Park, which is located on the site where the new prints were found, explained that the discovery was made in the past two weeks by a team of experts headed by a Swiss paleontologist named Christian Meyer, who is the director of the Natural History Museum of Basel.
Meyer came to Bolivia specifically to observe new areas of the outcrop opened up by quarrying works. The outcrop, which is 360 feet high and nearly a mile wide, was already famous for the 5,022 dinosaur tracks that have been registered there since 2006.
According to Baldivieso, the works of a limestone quarry near the paleontological site have revealed another 5,000 footprints. Several species' footprints have been found by researchers. This includes two that will be named Sucre and Cal Orcko. Sucre and Cal Orcko were not known before, and one is named after the country's capital.
"We already had the largest site in the world with the original 5,022 footprints, now we have many more by far than any other site," Baldivieso said. "More than 10,000 tracks have been found and we're still waiting for the final report."
Meyer extolled the virtues of the site, explaining that Cal Orcko is the biggest site on Earth.
"...there's no other site with more than 10,000 dinosaur tracks, it's a record on the planet, it's fantastic," Meyer said.
According to Cretaceous Park, the various species that inhabited this area of Bolivia lived about 65 million years ago.
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