dinosaur footprints Monument

MORE than 200 dinosaur footprints have been discovered in a quarry near the sanctuary of Fatima in Portugal. The footprints form at least 15 tracks, two of which are more than 140 metres long. The longest track has 90 footprints. "It's as if the track were fresh - as if we just saw the animals passing," says Vanda Santos, a Portuguese palaeontologist.

Taken together with the single 141-metre track discovered near Lisbon two years ago, they make Portugal one of the world's most important sources of fossilised dinosaur footprints.

The discovery dates from the Middle Jurassic period, about 180 million years ago. "This must be by far the best Middle Jurassic site in the world," says Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado at Denver, who is working on the site.

In a sign of this Park:

The extracting activity in this place allowed us to uncover the surface that had been stepped on by dinosaurs millions of years before.
The many dark spots with radial fissures resulted from this activity and are due to the detonation of explosive charges and they should not be mistaken with the lined up print marks.
Several hundreds of organized prints were left here in twenty trails of quadruped dinosaurs, characterized by an exceptional state of conservation, which gives us a good information about these animals.
This place contains the oldest recorded presence of sauropod dinosaurs’ footprints and it also holds the evidence of the existence of some of the largest land animals that had ever lived on Earth.
The blue greyish spots on the slab are areas of limestone where the alteration of the stone is not so noticeable