I loved the article below, which I came across through a link in this morning's WaPo Likely footprint of spiky dinosaur has NASA’s Md. campus on cloud nine.
It was originally published last April.
OK, eccentric to some. Great story, great pictures, especially if you like dinosaurs and/or exceptional people. And there's a surprise at the end, as you find out Ray Stanford's real passion!
Tireless tracker rewrote the book on dinosaurs in Maryland
In fact, before Stanford, only a handful of dinosaur tracks had ever been found in Maryland, in much older rocks 100 miles away in a quarry near Emmitsburg. Some of the great dinosaur hunters of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Yale University’s O.C. Marsh, had searched the Washington area and found the bones and teeth of three or four species. But no footprints had ever been found. The iron-rich geology wasn’t right for it. The textbooks said so.
Stanford knew this. In 1994, his three children from a previous marriage were visiting, and his youngest son, then 9, was going through his dinosaur-crazy phase.
One August afternoon, out hunting for Indian arrowheads, Stanford found a flat rock with an impression that looked like three fat toes. The children had been flipping through an illustrated guide to dinosaur tracks, so they were primed: It was the footprint of an iguanodon, a two-legged herbivore.
Read the whole article - a fascinating look at a "character."
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