SALT LAKE CITY — So maybe there was no dinosaur dancing after all.
A group of paleontologists say there are no signs of dinosaur tracks at a remote spot along the Utah-Arizona border that had been described by University of Utah geologists as a “dinosaur dance floor” for its density of tracks.
“We didn’t observe a single footprint,” said Andrew Milner, paleontologist at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in southwestern Utah.
He was one of four paleontologists who hiked into the area recently after a heavily publicized study claiming there were more than 1,000 previously unknown dinosaur tracks crammed onto a 3/4-acre site on the Arizona portion of Vermillion Cliffs National Monument.
“We went up there optimistic, really hoping we were going to find footprints,” Milner said.
They determined there were none. Instead, it was a dense collection of erosion-caused potholes in the sandstone, they said.
And the supposed tail-drag marks in the rock? Probably another result of erosion, the paleontologists said.
