Halfway through a 16-day field expedition, scientists looking for signs of dinosaurs along the Yukon River stumbled upon a big find: a trove of bird footprints all over the tops of more than a dozen big blocks of rock.
“I like when they’re this easy to see. These are beautiful and they’re just everywhere," said Paleontologist Tony Fiorillo.
Fiorillo, who also directs the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, said that this must have been a place where ancient birds liked to be. Maybe there was lots of food here for them. He’s found tracks like this in other parts of Alaska.
“This is crazy. And, you know, the strange thing is this kind of bird track, whether we see it here, whether we see it in Denali, we always find them in clusters. Like, so it would suggest whatever this bird is, it would suggest that it’s gregarious, or it just had a lot of nervous feet," Fiorillo said.
The tracks were made by something that Fiorillo says is shore-bird like. Over the course of an afternoon, Fiorillo and his colleague Yoshi Kobayashi, a paleontology professor from Japan’s Hokkaido University, identified footprints from at least five ancient bird and dinosaur species that once lived along the Yukon.
There’s no record of any paleontologist combing this section of the Yukon River for details about dinosaurs that date back to the early Cretaceous Period.
Kobayashi has been all over the world tracking down dinosaurs, including in Mongolia and Uzbekistan. He said that it’s not necessarily rare to find blocks of rocks rich with bird tracks.
"There's a place in South Korea that if you go to the southern tip of the peninsula, Korean Peninsula, there’s a beach with rock covered with small bird tracks. It’s pretty amazing," Kobayashi said.
The team chose this part of the river to explore because they wanted to know more about the ancient biodiversity, and they say that they’re surprised by what they’ve found. There are many more species of ancient reptiles and birds than they were expecting.
The researchers will continue downriver past Kaltag for the next few days. They’ll head back upriver for Nulato by Aug. 16 for a conversation with the community about what they've found.
They'll be at Nulato's Multipurpose Building at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Aug.17.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with the new date and time for a community meeting about what the team has found.
