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May 10, 2007, 05:48 PM ET
A New Technology Preserves Dinosaur Footprints
A new technology is saving traces of some of the world's oldest creatures. In northern Spain, there is a fragile cliff face. More than 65 million years and a few ground upheavals ago, this land was horizontal, and dinosaurs stomped across it. They left thousands of footprints.
But today those prints are too delicate to touch. And they are eroding away in the wind and rain. So scientists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Manchester are preserving them digitally. By bouncing laser beams off the footprints, capturing the reflections with a digital camera, and cross-referencing them with a GPS receiver, the researchers are able to create an accurate 3D model, in a computer, of the prints and their locations.
Long after the prints have gone the way of the creatures that made them, paleontologists will be able to examine this record and glean vital clues to the way these animals -- giant vegetarian sauropods and predatory theropods -- moved and lived. --Josh Fischman
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