Albuquerque museum leader visits Alaska to study dinosaurs, some of which have ties to New Mexico

Albuquerque museum leader visits Alaska to study dinosaurs, some of which have ties to New Mexico

NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – Located on a cliff bordering the Gulf of Alaska, set inside one of the wildest and least visited places in the National Park System, are hundreds of dinosaur footprints. For Paleontologist Dr. Anthony Fiorillo, who is also the executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, these tracks help shape the narrative of how dinosaurs traveled to New Mexico millions of years ago.

“Every trip we find more, which is just sort of a mind-blowing experience; that one of the best records to study dinosaurs and their environments anywhere in the world is one of the hardest places to get to,” Fiorillo said about his 12th visit to the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in August to study dinosaur tracks.

Fiorillo has conducted research in Alaska for 28 years and made the first discovery of dinosaur footprints in any Alaskan national park. His research focuses on dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period. “There are two windows that I work on. One is about 70 million years ago, 70, 72 million years. And then the other one is about 100 million years ago when that Bering Land Bridge first in place geologically,” he explained.

The Bering Land Bridge is a significant feature, which Fiorillo and researchers say allowed dinosaurs to travel from Central Asia to the Western United States, including Alaska and New Mexico. According to Fiorillo, all the dinosaurs found in New Mexico, except for Almasaurus—a giant sauropod originally found in the Land of Enchantment—came to New Mexico from Central Asia through Alaska.

So what dinosaur tracks has Fiorillo found on the Aniakchak cliff that have ties to New Mexico? Here are a few examples:

“Somewhere around 90 to 95 percent of all the tracks we find belong to duck-billed dinosaurs. And it’s a little more interesting than that, in that we have full-grown duck-billed dinosaur footprints all the way down to little children, duck-billed dinosaurs, if you will,” Fiorillo said, adding that based on the variety of tracks, it appears these dinosaurs may have nested in the area.

“We have also found the footprints of armored dinosaurs called Ankylosaurs. They’re not real, real common, but they’re there. We’ve also found footprints of smaller Theropod dinosaurs, meat-eating dinosaurs, but we’ve also found a full-sized Tyrannosaur track out there. So there’s big meat-eaters and little meat-eaters,” he explained, saying he has also found two kinds of bird tracks.

As Fiorillo continues to find more dinosaur footprints at the Aniakchak location, his research also includes looking at the surrounding environment, such as the vegetation, rock formations, and water sources, to hopefully understand what it may have looked like then and why and how it changed over time.

“For example, these dinosaurs lived in a tidally influenced sort of estuary environment. Some of them lived, were basically walking on the beach, and some of them were walking within areas that were more rivers and streams with some floodplains,” Fiorillo said, noting that the Anichak location where the dinosaur tracks were discovered is an “atypical setting.”

“This is a very, um, atypical setting for finding dinosaurs, because you’re on a beach cliff. You’ve got, you’re at high latitude. There’s plenty of vegetation covering a lot of rocks elsewhere,” Fiorillo explained. “The thing that I think is really, in addition to helping us understand New Mexico dinosaurs, one of the things that’s important about this work is the temperatures were warmer back then. It was a warmer Arctic. And we think, based on the total summation of all the work we’ve done around Alaska, that we’re looking at a warmer Arctic.”

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