Sunday, August 20, 2006
Swiss help preserve footprints of time
More than 5,000 huge footprints criss-cross a crumbling wall at a quarry near Sucre, Bolivia - the largest site of dinosaur tracks in the world.
But Cal Orck'o, as it is known locally, is under threat from erosion. To secure the endangered site the Bolivian government has called upon Swiss expertise.
'It surpasses anything I've ever seen,' said palaeontologist Christian Meyer, the director of Basel's Natural History Museum, who led the first team of scientists to map the site in 1998...
...'If you compare Cal Orck'o with the biggest dinosaur sites in Australia, the United States, Asia or Europe, this is by far the largest,' Meyer told swissinfo.
'The diversity of dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous period is frozen in time, just before they became extinct.' [footprints, species]
technorati tags: sucre, bolivia, dinosaur, tracks, swiss, dinosaurs, geological, record, footprints, species, australia, united+states, asia, europe, diversity, cretaceous, extinct, cal orck'o
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