<i>Geologists discover 'dinosaur dance floor'</i>
This undated photo released by the University of Utah shows a trackway, or set of prints made by the same dinosaur, as it walked through a wet, sandy oasis some 190 million years ago in what is now the Coyote Buttes North area straddling the Utah-Arizona border. Photo: AP
Geologists say they have discovered prehistoric animal tracks so densely packed on a 3/4-acre site that they're calling it a "dinosaur dance floor."
The site along the Arizona-Utah state line offers a rich new set of clues about the lives of dinosaurs 190 million years ago.
Back then, large stretches of the West were a Sahara-like desert. More than 1,000 tracks were found in what would have been a watery oasis nestled among towering, wind-whipped sand dunes.
The footprints could provide fodder for researchers trying to understand dinosaurs that survived in what many considered a "vast, dry, uninhabitable desert," said Marjorie Chan, professor of geology at the University of Utah and one of the authors of a new study of the site.
"Maybe it really wasn't as lifeless as we think," Chan said Monday.
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