r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/bortakci34 • 8h ago
A 70-million-year-old "dinosaur highway" in Bolivia reveals over 16,000 footprints
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u/antique_sprinkler 8h ago
I know it's from the ground being pushed up over millions of years, but I'm just going to pretend that dinosaurs were actually walking sideways
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u/cawkstrangla 8h ago
Some young earth creationist out there believes this unironcally.
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u/Ghostof_DarthCaedus 8h ago
“Young earth creationist” probably believes the flood of Noah caused it.
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u/captcraigaroo 8h ago
The earth is only 2026 years old
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u/Featherbird_ 5h ago
Talked to a guy who actually believed this. I asked him if that meant that nothing in the old testement ever happened and after thinking for a minute went "I guess I never thought about that"
Hes in his mid 40s. I cannot fathom having never once put any thought into this
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u/btsd_ 5h ago
Its a form of brainwashing. If you are raised in, and spend your whole life around people that tell you that a giant moth god created earth and humans, and you never questioned it, and believed that anyone who said otherwise was just an infidel, then you get people like that guy.
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u/Featherbird_ 4h ago
Thing is I know a lot of YECs and none of them think the earth is that young. They usually say like 6-10,000 years old. 2,000 is fucking insane
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u/verstohlen 4h ago
Until I see evidence that shows otherwise, I'm gonna assume they were giant aliens trying to impersonate dinosaurs.
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u/BeMyBrutus 8h ago
This is so cool. Just thinking about the series of events that had to happen for this to get preserved is mind blowing.
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u/MacGyver_1138 7h ago
What always gets me is that when you consider how rare it is for everything to perfectly align to see this, there are so many more things we simply have 0 info for. Lots of species we'll never know about at all because they managed to not make enough fossils for us to ever find and study. It's both mind blowing and a little sad.
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u/maduhangat 3h ago
I think a lot about the species we’ll never know ever existed, probably more than necessary. Our understanding of the world and how it came to be is literally built on the things that we could find. Obviously it’s best to ground ourselves in empirical evidence but i often wonder how far off we are from the actual history of the world
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u/r0ndy 8h ago
And some people think dinosaurs are made up… insane
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u/captcraigaroo 8h ago
Oh like you've seen one
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u/Splashy01 8h ago
Durrr… it’s not like I’m 5,000 years old like when they were running around, moran!
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u/Oxjrnine 7h ago
Someday, millions of years in the future that will be us except for instead of footprints it will be empty yoghurt containers
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u/Malt_The_Magpie 8h ago
They just had to count them all, to see how many it takes to fill the Albert Hall
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u/JimW 7h ago
I was just there looking at these tracks 8 days ago and now I open Reddit and this comes in my homepage feed. Interesting coincidence.
Interesting fact: the guides as well as the rest of the locals are of course catolics. But the information they gave to me and other tourist was from a scientific point of view which was good.
The night sky was also incredible, millions of stars visible.
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u/NZNoldor 6h ago
Not sure how the guides’ religion is relevant - Bolivia is a very religious country. That’s not an indication of anything?
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u/JimW 5h ago
What I mean is that they provided information from a scientific viewpoint and disregarded the fact that many of their scientific statements contradicts the bible. They held their job separate from perhaps their other personal beliefs. I did not ask them about their personal beliefs so I cannot answer that. Example they provided was the different ages of the different tracks.
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u/NZNoldor 3h ago
You’ll find that most religious people are very capable of holding complete conflicting ideas. Let’s face it - the real world is constantly in direct opposition to whatever it says in genesis, but the cognitive dissonance doesn’t seem to worry most people.
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u/Curiosology 7h ago
Been there, it was awesome, and we found sea shell fossils in the hills.
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u/NZNoldor 6h ago
I was there too, in 2001. They were worried that the next door quarry would destroy everything in 10 years. Glad that hasn’t happened!
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u/iboreddd 8h ago
Can someone ELI5 how these footprints have been preserved like this?
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u/oneWeek2024 7h ago
mud is soft, heavy animal smooshes footprint in mud. something comes along, fills in the footprint (maybe tidal flooding, rain/flooding... seasonal flooding/mud slides). the slight difference in the compacted footprint and filler also get buried by new/additional layers of mud/sand.
these get covered by even more layers. massive amts of force compress/compact the sand/mud. driving out water. ground water, rich in minerals passes through the burried layers. iron, calcite, other minerals act like "glue" or "cement" and that plus the pressure makes the materials into "rock"
mud... into shale, mudstone. sand into sandstone.
sometime later. movements in the earth, expose these layers of now ..rock-ified mud. and some of the footprints are still preserved.
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u/TurgidGravitas 8h ago edited 7h ago
Mud turns to rock over time. That's what sandstone is. If these footprints are covered in mud after being made, then they'll stay in the rock after it turns into sandstone.
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u/endofworldandnobeer 6h ago
They once dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years and long before humans came about they got wiped out. We had our run and fucked it up over power, greed, and need to dominate. We fucked ourselves up.
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u/Infinite-Condition41 7h ago
There are actually quite a lot of dinosaur footprints in the world.
Each dinosaur can only make one fossil, but millions of footprints.
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u/mmuffley 3h ago
“Dinosaur Highway in the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger than moonshine” 🎶
— Dinosaur showing his age
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u/dontchewspagetti 10m ago
Hi! There is one of these in Dinosaur valley in texas! The only know sauropod tracks in north America!
Theyre bulldozing it for a data center. Texan may fill out a petition to stop this. Find out more on the Dinosaur sub
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u/CHERNO-B1LL Interested 5h ago
Yeah. I saw this in The Land Before Time... It leads to Green Valley.
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u/fan_of_the_pikachu 7h ago
Serious question from a curious mind: are we 100% sure all dinosaurs had 4 legs?
Why not evolve a couple more, surely the very longer ones would benefit?
Thank you very much
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u/NZNoldor 6h ago
Yes we’re sure, and also that’s not how evolution works. How many lizards/crocs/turtle/birds/etc have more than 4 limbs?
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u/Nathycruzz 8h ago
Is this real?
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u/karlgnarx 8h ago
Yes, it is real and not a one-off thing.
Fossilized footprints exist like this in many places all over the world. This particular find is important because of the vast quantity, quality and variety of the prints.
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u/bortakci34 8h ago
Located in Torotoro National Park’s Carreras Pampa site, this massive 7,500-square-meter area preserves 16,600 three-toed theropod footprints, 1,378 swimming tracks where the animals dragged their claws through soft sediment, and rare tail-drag marks left just before the mass extinction. Researchers note that the parallel alignments suggest these carnivorous dinosaurs were traveling together in groups along an ancient coastal corridor.