Fossil footprints 'unique in the world' show a human chasing a giant sloth (WaPo)
by Ben Guarino April 25 Email the author
Each year 500,000 people visit New Mexico's White Sands National Monument to hike and frolic among gypsum dunes. Aside from the tourists, few animals in the region get much larger than a coyote or bobcat. But in an epoch called the Pleistocene, which started 2.5 million years ago and ended about 12,000 years ago, the alkali flats and nearby lakes attracted giants. Mammoths and mastodons walked the playa, as did saber-tooth cats, North American camels and huge, 8,000-pound sloths.
Where these creatures went, ancient humans followed. We know this because the travelers left footprints — physical evidence that people chased the giants. In a western corner of White Sands, scientists recently found a human print inside a ground sloth's paw marks, they report in a new analysis of the park's tracks in the journal Science Advances.
“Thousands and thousands of trackways” crisscross the area, said Vince Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service and an author of the new report. The official term for such concentrated pathways is a megatrack site. The megatrack site in White Sands “is the largest one that we know of in North America” from the Pleistocene.
In 1981, geologists investigated tracks of camels and other four-footed animals at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. It was not until 2011 that researchers began a systematic survey of the megatrack site, including drone flights over the sand in 2014. This survey revealed the first collection of human tracks: 27 individual footprints that vanished into a dune.
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/25/humans-stalked-giant-sloths-ancient-footprints-at-white-sands-national-monument-show/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b07db392a0ec
There was an earlier post in Anthropology, but it didn't get much attention, so I thought it was worth trying again. Of course, no one paid much attention to the giant ichthyosaur, so who knows.
Unlinkable video at the site.
Tracking the footprints. Image via Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University.
Footprint comparison. Image via David Bustos, National Park Service.
= new reply since forum marked as read
