MUNGO EATS Latin America

It’s very possible that by the end of this post, you’ll think I’VE been chewing too many coca leaves, but here it goes anyway.  Today we visited the “dinosaur park” (Royal Tyrrell Museum, you have nothing to fear!).  To get there, we loaded into the “dino truck” and away we went.

It would seem that some dinosaur footprints were discovered just over 10 years ago, when a cement company was chewing up a mountain, in an effort to make cement.  In my romantic mind, some worker saw the footprints and brought the whole operation to a standstill, while the footprints were investigated.  In reality, the slab of rock that contains the footprints, was fortunately high in magnesium, which apparently will stop concrete from becoming solid, so the slab was abandoned.  In any case, there is a large vertical slab of rock, which contains hundreds of different prints “walking” across it. 

The footprints are visible, but not really easy to decipher, so visitors are assigned a guide and initially you go and look at a picture of the slab and some “mock” footprints, so that when you look at the real wall, the prints  are more visible.  Our guide spoke English, although his English was a bit rough.  He started telling us about the wall sliding off, and I must admit, we were a bit baffled at first.  Eventually we began to understand.  It seems that 2 days ago,  a large portion of the wall fractured and crumbled to the ground.  Lost from this portion of the slab, were the most impressive set of prints, a double track of “long-neck” tracks.  Oops!!! 

These  are the tracks that “slid off”.  The slab now has a large V of missing rock.  

All the debris from the slough is sitting at the bottom of the V.  Despite the loss of the “best” prints, there are still a lot of prints to see.  Now I could see them, and I tried my hardest to increase the contrast in the photos, so that you could see them too, but I am not making any promises. 

  In this picture, there are two sets of prints, one on the right hand side going from bottom to top, and a second set of prints to the left which are really only visible about 1/2 way up the slab. 

In this picture, the tracks run pretty much straight up the middle.

Are you starting to be able to pick them out??

Okay, enough imagining for one day.  They were quite cool to see.  I guess now there is talk of trying preserve the slab before more footprints slide off.  They are talking about coating the slab as silicone.  If they do this, the slab would be preserved, and it would be safe for tourists to look at the prints close up.  He mentioned that it may cost up to 12 million dollars to do this though.  Hope they find the money somehow, it would be a shame to lose the prints!