Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up.

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Oldest known footprints in the Grand Canyon found

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Exposed by a rockfall, the oddly angled tracks offer a rare glimpse into early animal behavior.

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Rowland learned of the tracks by chance back in 2016, when a paleontologist friend of his was hiking the Grand Canyon with students. As they hiked Bright Angel Trail, the group saw a rock that had fallen out of the cliffside and cracked open.

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The busted boulder had split along an inner seam, revealing a natural mold and cast of 28 footprints stretched out in a line more than a yard long. The friend let Rowland and park officials know, and a field crew pulled the rock off to the side. In May 2017, Rowland visited the prints, and in March 2018, he returned with San Diego State University geologist Mario Caputo to study them.

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Exposed by a rockfall, the footprints are now the oldest ever discovered in the Grand Canyon, scientists reported this month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The prints are also noteworthy for their strangeness: Each one is angled 40 degrees from the direction of walking, as if the animal had a diagonal gait.

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Tantalizingly, these prints were made right around the time that reptiles' oldest ancestors started to diversify, and they resemble 299-million-year-old footprints found in Scotland made by early reptiles or amphibians with reptile-like proportions. If similar animals made both trackways, the Grand Canyon tracks could be the oldest footprints of their kind by more than 10 million years.

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The team is also debating why the footprints are angled so weirdly. Was the animal struggling to walk into a strong wind? Or did it angle its gait as it walked down a sand dune, so it didn't slip? Caputo's study of the sandstone will help tease out these scenarios.

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If the exposure allows it, it will enable me to say, okay, this organism was walking near the crest or the summit of this dune ... or perhaps in an area in between dunes, he says. Such specifics will let researchers reconstruct a single moment in the life of an animal that died more than 300 million years agoan impressively intimate scientific feat.

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Of course it's just an animal running from the Flood waters about 4500 years ago and eventually overtaken and buried in that particular layer...

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...which of course isn't a time period hundreds of millions of years old.

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Funny, it's rock layers that are labeled as time periods in scads of illustrations of the geo column

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As for footprints on layers, some animals obviously escaped wave after wave of the Flood's incursion before finally getting caught. Big deal.

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