First Alert 4 News reports “SNOWFLAKE, Ariz. – Around 240 million years ago, groups of giant lizard-like animals that predated the dinosaurs walked across Arizona.
Today, their journey and their footsteps are fossilized near the town of Snowflake in eastern Arizona – surprising one retiree when he discovered them on his property. James Lang bought his Arizona property without even visiting it in person after retiring from a law career in Chicago. He was hoping for a peaceful retirement, but one day, on a walk, he noticed something sticking out with footprints.
“It had a front and a rear on it, so I’m picking up, I’m looking, thinking this is amazing,” Lang said. “So I’m hauling this rock up, we’d walk a quarter mile. I realized there had to be more down there.”
So began the five-year journey of retrieving slabs of rock that preserved chirotherium tracks – a Triassic trace fossil consisting of five-fingered footprints, made by the lizard-like animals called pseudosuchian archosaurs.
“These aren’t actually dinosaurs,” Lang said. “These are pre-dinosaurs. They’re archosaurs. They’re big reptiles, but [the fossils are] called chirotherium because it looks like a hand. So, ‘chiro’ means hand, ‘therium’ means monster or beast.”
Over the years, Lang carried and dragged the slabs back to his house, and eventually got a tractor to help. He then spent tedious hours arranging them to show the animals’ strides. Other slabs he gathered showed different variations of the chirotherium and the tracks of other animals. I come out in the morning, drink my coffee, and just sit there and look at that, and think I have an entire museum in my front yard,” Lang said.
Knowing he had something incredible, Lang reached out to curator Spencer Lucas at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science who brought a team of paleontologists to Lang’s home.
It was soon clear this discovery was one of a kind.
“It is the most extensive and well-preserved footprint locality of its age in North America, which makes it one of the best in the world,” Lucas said. “The only sites that I think are a little bit better are a couple that are in Germany.”
Now, there’s a scientific paper on Lang’s discovery, and the fossils are now at the New Mexico Museum for further study and will be on display soon. Lang said he wants to keep finding more tracks and hopes to get them in museums across the U.S. to inspire the next generation to dig.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “I’ve got a friend I grew up with since first grade whose grandson out in California has been following along. I’ve been sending them pictures. I sent him some tracks … I thought, wow, if he’s going to be the next paleontologist I thought that’s pretty cool.”
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