In the Picketwire Canyonlands of the Comanche National Grassland, south of La Junta, Colorado, the limestone along the Purgatoire River, the Picketwire, holds one of the largest dinosaur tracksites in North America: more than 100 trackways and over 1,500 footprints, left by dinosaurs walking on two legs and on four along the shore of a big freshwater lake in the Jurassic. The sauropod trackways run side by side, and when 90 more parallel trackways were uncovered in 2012 they confirmed the site’s great finding, that these giants moved together in groups. Since 2001 volunteers and the Sternberg Museum of Natural History have been recovering the massive bones of a sauropod skeleton from the same canyonlands, and older finds there have prompted a rethink of how the Triassic rocks of the region line up across several states. The site is far from paved roads. You reach it on foot, by mountain bike or on horseback; motor vehicles go in only on Forest Service tours.
Over 1,500 footprints, and sauropods that walked in herds · Jurassic, Morrison Formation
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
