Hikers discover oldest prehistoric footprints found at Grand Canyon

by Adnan Alam
  • Slug: BC-CNS-Fossil Find,400
  • 2 photos, audio story available (thumbnails, captions below)

By KAELY MONAHAN, LAUREN GILGER and MARK BRODIE
KJZZ

PHOENIX – When you’re out hiking, you never know what you might see. You could cross paths with lizards, tarantulas or maybe even something bigger like a javelina. More likely, you’ll also come across the tracks of these critters.

But imagine you’re hiking in the Grand Canyon, and you stumble upon a slab of fallen rock. On it are some odd indentations like overly baked footprints. That’s exactly what happened to a group of hikers on the Bright Angel Trail last year.

A set of 28 small footprints were discovered on a slab of rock that had fallen from the canyon wall. It turns out that the set of tracks is about 310 million years old – nearly 250 million years before the age of dinosaurs. Steve Rowland, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, called the find remarkable.

“There are some trilobite tracks and other little arthropods and things older. But in terms of actual vertebrate animals these are the oldest by far. Nobody’s ever found any tracks this low, this old in in the Grand Canyon,” Rowland said.

Until now, no reptile tracks have ever been found in this type of rock before in the Grand Canyon. Rowland said paleontologists such as himself have never bothered to look in that area for ancient animal tracks since none have ever been found. But this discovery is a game changer.

“Now that we know there were animals walking around … at that time period we can … look at some other places and see if we can find any any additional tracks.”

But what animal made those tracks is still a mystery. Rowland said it’s definitely some kind of prehistoric reptilian creature, which was living at the very beginning of reptile evolution.

“It looks like a reptile track. Amphibian tracks tend to have short stubby little toes like salamander toes for example or toad toes. These these are long skinny toes that look much more reptilian,” Rowland said. “So I think this is some sort of reptile but it’s extraordinarily early just the reptiles were just appearing at the time that this animal was walking around.”

He said it might have looked like some sort of small reptile, but we won’t really know without finding the animal’s bones. Rowland’s team will publish their research in January.

This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal.

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A set of 28 small footprints were discovered on a slab of rock that fell from a wall deep in the Grand Canyon. Paleontologists say the tracks were made by an early reptile nearly 250 million years before the rise of dinosaurs. (Photo by Steve Rowland/University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Steve Rowland said he and other paleontologists had never bothered to look for ancient tracks in that area because none had been found there. But this discovery is a game changer, he said. “Nobody’s ever found any tracks this low, this old in the Grand Canyon.” (Photo by Eric Rowland/University of Nevada, Las Vegas)