Canada Has 100mn-Year-Old Dinosaur Tracks That Could Push Tourism For Country

An area the size of three Canadian football fields in northeastern British Columbia has been found to host ancient dinosaur footprints. Called “dinosaur Autobahn,” the footmarks are believed to be over 100 million years old and belonged to the extinct carnivores and herbivores.

Paleontologist Rich McCrea told the Canadian Press that they saw over 20 trackways that contained footprints of different animals. They were pressed into the flat, rocky surface. The number could indicate that the area in northeastern British Columbia might have been a busy and major thoroughfare for the dinosaurs.

"We're looking at a few hundred footprints that were exposed when I visited the site. If it keeps up that density and we are able to peel back a bit of the surface and expand it by another 1,000 square metres, we're likely to find there are thousands of footprints," McCrea said.

One of the footprints they saw belonged to the Allosaurus, described as an 8.5-metre-long, two-legged predator. It has a huge head and rows of big teeth as well. There are also the tracks of the Anklosaurus, a four-legged, nine-metre-long herbivore. "This was still in the dinosaurs' heyday," McCrea gushed. "It's kind of like the middle age of dinosaurs."

Asked if the site can gather enough tourists for the BC area and for Canada as a whole, McCrea said this isn’t impossible. "It would be one of the top sites, unquestionably," McCrea said. "It already looks like it's going to be one of the biggest sites in Canada. That also means one of the biggest sites in the world."

McCrea suggested building a tourist building at Williston Lake overlooking the dinosaur trackway area, which is quite similar to China's Zigong Dinosaur Museum. That facility, he said, is visited by seven million people annually. "People go crazy when they see dinosaur bones and fossils. There's something about it: the old Jurassic Park movie coming to life in your riding," he said. However, asking the BC government to relax its rules concerning the promotion and protection of dinosaur zones is a totally, different thing, he added.

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