On the outskirts of the city of Sucre, in Bolivia, is a large cement plant, and when the quarry it uses was being expanded, workers discovered a huge vertical wall of rock with thousands of dinosaur footprints. The site is called Cal Orcko (also spelled Cal Orko) and it´s the largest concentration of dinosaur tracks in the world.
The slab of limestone is enormous - 1.2 km long and 80 meters high, and has more than 5,000 footprints, with 462 individual trails made during the second half of the Cretaceous period. The location used to be the shore of a former lake, that attracted large number of herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs. The creatures' feet sank into the soft shoreline in warm damp weather, leaving marks that were solidified by later periods of drought. Wet weather then returned, sealing the prints below mud and sediment. The wet-dry pattern was repeated seven times, preserving multiple layers of prints. Tectonic upheaval then pushed the flat ground up at a brilliant viewing angle that it is today.
The slab of limestone is enormous - 1.2 km long and 80 meters high, and has more than 5,000 footprints, with 462 individual trails made during the second half of the Cretaceous period. The location used to be the shore of a former lake, that attracted large number of herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs. The creatures' feet sank into the soft shoreline in warm damp weather, leaving marks that were solidified by later periods of drought. Wet weather then returned, sealing the prints below mud and sediment. The wet-dry pattern was repeated seven times, preserving multiple layers of prints. Tectonic upheaval then pushed the flat ground up at a brilliant viewing angle that it is today.
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