Ed Yeates Reporting
Scientists have rappelled off a 400-foot high cliff in Utah's Cedar Mountains to document a discovery unequalled in North America.
Scientists from Colorado and Utah flung ropes over a mesa near Arches National Park. They carefully scaled 400 feet down a cliff side to date a layer of rock. Embedded on the top in about a one inch slate of sandstone -- 125 million year old bird tacks!
Dr. James Kirkland, State Paleontologist, Utah Geological Survey: "These are the oldest bird tracks ever found in the continent of North America, the oldest evidence of birds in North America, and they date at the same age as one of the most important discoveries of this century in terms of dinosaurs and birds."
It's difficult knowing what they looked like. They were small, perhaps the size of shoreline birds, like those that fly on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Similar in size, but very different.
Joanna Wright, Geology, University of Colorado, Denver: "We probably couldn't put them in a family of modern birds because this is really early on and we really don't know exactly what families of modern birds that we've got this early on, if we've got any at all."
Like a recent dinosaur find not far from here, the Cedar Mountain Formation is turning out to be a gold mine for discoveries, not from just one prehistoric period but several - all neatly layered like a sandwich.
Dr. Kirkland: "Here's this little thin interval of time representing 30 to 35 million years of earth history. That's half the entire age of mammals. An incredible record, and there's fossils at every level. We can actually see the transition from Jurassic to Cretaceous. This is the only place in North America where that exists."
Let's take you back about 125 million years ago. This was all water - a lake about 50 feet deep. And the shoreline would have been up on the cliff face, about where you see the green rocks. And along that shoreline, that's where the birds were walking.
Their descendants could have converged from dinosaurs 20 million years earlier.
John Foster, Curator of Paleontology, Museum of Western Colorado: "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 a bit."
Preservation here is remarkable. The sandstone even froze in time the ripple pattern of water along the shoreline where the birds walked.
The bird tracks will eventually be displayed at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.
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