SNOWFLAKE, AZ (AZFamily) — 240 million years ago, groups of giant lizards that predated the dinosaurs walked across Arizona.
Today, their journey and their footsteps are fossilized outside of Snowflake in Eastern Arizona.
James Lang bought his 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 of the wash 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.
“These aren’t actually dinosaurs,” Lang said. “These are predinosaurs. They’re archosaurs. They’re big reptiles but it’s called chirotherium because it looks like a hand. So ‘chiro’ means hand ‘therium’ means monster or beast.”
Over the years, he carried, dragged and eventually got a tractor to bring the slabs with footprints to his house. He then spent tedious hours arranging them to show the chirotherium’s stride.
Other slabs he gathered showed different variations of the chirotherium, its scales 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 Spencer Lucas at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science who then brought a team of paleontologists to Lang’s home.
“The footprints are on the bottom of the sandstone layer because what they are is they’re convex, so that the animals were not walking on the sandstone,” Lucas said. “They were walking on the clay. And then when the sandstone was deposited, it filled in.”
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 the tracks, which are 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 for their own dinosaur.
“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. He’s just online away. I thought, wow, if he’s going to be the next paleontologist I thought that’s pretty cool.”
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