From Deseret News archives:
Continent's oldest bird tracks found near Moab
Fossilized marks in Cedar Mountain Formation are 125 million years old
Utah's state paleontologist, Dr. James Kirkland, said at the site in the desert mountains near Moab that the tracks "date at the same age as one of the most important discoveries of this century in terms of dinosaurs and birds," a time of change among the earth's creatures.
John Foster, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Western Colorado, agreed. "To get much older than this, you have to go into the late Jurassic and the (bird) bones that have been discovered in Europe."
Foster said the birds are probably descendants of creatures that began emerging from dinosaurs some 20 million years earlier.
"So what we're seeing here are birds that are already on the branch that split off from carnivorous dinosaurs and they're already starting to specialize in what they do." he said.
Some rappelled from the top of the mesa down a 400-foot cliff to document the age of the layer where the tracks were found.
Along with bird tracks, the Colorado and Utah scientists are uncovering even more from what Kirkland calls "a gold mine for earth scientists a whole new realm for discoveries of dinosaurs, birds and other creatures."
The Cedar Mountain Formation is like layer after layer of a set of prehistoric diaries. Sandwiched in these layers, the Cretaceous Period is several hundred feet thick. There's a couple of miles of Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs were dominant, below that, and a couple of miles of Late Cretaceous on top.
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