I guess when you spend the majority of your profession looking up, you might miss some details on the ground. Like the dinner-plate sized footprint of a Nodosaurus, one of which has been found and verified by paleontologists on the grounds of Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s first headquarters and the largest concentration of space-interested scientists in the country.
On a related note… Nodosaurus. Close your mouth when you drink, jeeze. We’ve got company over.
What? No, of course they didn’t find a dinosaur footprint in space. Dinosaurs in space, who would ever…
Okay, well that’s not necessarily –
Alright, I admit, those guys actually were descended from –
FINE. Fine. Dinosaurs and space. The combination is awesome. That’s why you’re here. Goddard Space Center is located in Maryland, and so in some ways this isn’t so surprising. The area is rife with fossil discoveries, mostly found in the long period in which the area between Washington and Baltimore was mined for iron. The footprint was found by Ray Stanford, amateur paleontologist, and verified by professional paleontologist David Weishampel of Johns Hopkins. Proof, indeed, that 110 million years before all those scientists showed up, a Nodosaurus trotted swiftly across a Cretaceous bog.
Leaving four cute little toes to be discovered later. While the footprint gets cleaned up and excavated, NASA is keeping its precise location on the Goddard campus secret, for fear that it might be accidentally or deliberately injured by contact with too many people.
Now you know what the next step is NASA. Name the dinosaur. Then name a planet after the dinosaur.
(via Huffington Post.)
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