Hoof print of 70-foot dinosaur discovered near Virginia river

WASHINGTON — Of all the exotic places Jon Bachman has looked for dinosaur tracks and other animal remains — Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Badlands of South Dakota — the one that produced his biggest find, and perhaps one of the biggest ever on the East Coast, was behind the unsightly, smelly wastewater-treatment facility in Spotsylvania County, Va., not far from his home.

It was there last spring that Bachman, a former teacher and an amateur scientist, and Robert Weems, a paleontologist who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., spotted the imprint of part of the heel of a Sauroposeidon along the bank of the Rappahannock River.

To fishermen and others, the trace of a dinosaur footstep would have seemed nothing more than a slight, perhaps irregular, indentation in rock. But Bachman and Weems instantly recognized it.

Over the next couple of months, they spent more than 100 hours chiseling away about six inches of sandstone that covered the print and a small area around it. By midsummer the full mark of a stride taken by the long-necked, 70-foot-long beast came clear.

The two also spotted seven other prints in the immediate area, including those of the duck-billed Hadrosaur Eolambia, the slow-moving and heavily armored Nodosaur Priconodon, the herbivores Irenesauripus and Zephyrosaurus and Caririchnium, the ostrich-like Archaeornithomimus Megalosauripus and the long-necked Brontopodus birdi.

"We were freaked-out ecstatic," Bachman, 56, said Friday, standing over the track that has turned him into a local celebrity and capped two decades of searching for dinosaur prints and other animal fossils. "To somebody who has studied tracks, that's it, man."

"This fossil represents the biggest dinosaur by far known from Virginia," said Weems, who described it as "a giant duck foot." Weems said a handful of discoveries have been made in Maryland that would parallel what they found on the Rappahannock, but none that he knows of on the East Coast would surpass it.

The find became public last week because Bachman and Weems have agreed to make a presentation, using plaster and fiberglass molds of their finds, at a high school on Wednesday.

Weems said it makes sense for the prints to be where they found their recent trove. The farther east one goes from roughly Interstate 95, the better the chances of discovering something that has endured 110 million years or so, he said. The latest find dates from the early Cretaceous Period, when Sauroposeidons dined on the fernlike vegetation and sequoia trees that filled the area where the Rappahannock now flows.

There also were streams in the area, and sediment was left on their banks when they flooded. When that dried and mineralized, tracks were preserved as stone — and remained for eons before Bachman found them.

Bachman and Weems said the next step is to publish their find in a scientific journal, to make it official. Bachman said he also would like Spotsylvania to set aside the riverbank area and the prints.

"With further excavation, it would be ideal for a small park," he said.