By June Soh
Many
Washingtonians would have difficulty relating their city to the age of the
dinosaurs. But it's not a stretch for
Ray Stanford. He believes dinosaurs
took the region as their home more than 100 million years ago. And he has amassed dinosaur foot prints -
from fossils - that he found in the Washington
suburbs.
Photo © flickr.com/ Scott Kinmartin
|
On
most sunny days, Ray Stanford can be found along creeks in College
Park , Maryland , in the Washington suburbs. Stanford began hunting for fossil footprints
18 years ago. Since then, Stanford has collected more than a thousand
footprints of various kinds of dinosaurs.
He turned his living room into what he calls the "Stanford Museum ."
Standford
says a fossilized baby dinosaur in his collection is one of the only known
hatchling dinosaurs of any kind.
"It
is a natural cast of the mummy of a nodosaur fossil, an armored dinosaur that
grew to be very large and heavy as an adult," Standford notes.
Standford
donated some of his findings to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural
History in Washington . They are displayed in the "Dinosaurs in
Our Backyard" exhibit.
"Most
importantly, he has found footprints of dinosaurs that we haven't found bones
of yet. So because he has found the
footprints, you know that these dinosaurs lived here. We didn't have the
information before Ray discovered them," notes Matthew Carrano, the
museum's curator.
Recently
Stanford surprised even scientists at the U.S.
space agency by finding a dinosaur footprint on the grounds of NASA's Space
Flight Center in the Washington
suburbs.
Stanford
calls himself an amateur paleontologist.
But he has co-authored scientific papers with other scientists.
"It
is a great pleasure. You are seeing something that no one has ever seen. That
gives you a great sense of discovery, which is very exciting to me," says
Stanford.
Ray
Stanford plans to keep on tracking until "there is nothing left to
find."---VOA News
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