[background on area of Robledos Mountains]Recently opened during 1995. NEW EXHIBIT (Albuquerque, New Mexico) Ancient Evidence, Life Before Dinosaurs, featuring early Permian trackways from the Robledos Mountains, New Mexico, at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science. Contact Tom Williamson, Curator of Paleontology, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 1801 Mountain Road NW, Albuquerque, NM 87104-1375 [tel +1-505-841-8837, fax +1-505-841-8866, email tom@darwin.nmmnh-abq.mus.nm.us.
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When Jerry McDonald, a back-to-school geology student, first arrived at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and gazed across the Mesilla Valley at the Robledo Mountains, he had no idea how many days of scorching heat he would soon be spending in their rocky arroyos
. The Robledos have always been a fossil hunter's paradise, but it wasn't long before MacDonald became convinced that in the excitement of finding Permian fossils, the greatest secret of the Robledos had been overlooked.
Many collectors had found an occasional fossil footprint - a track. But what if an entire trackway - a series of footprints - could be uncovered? The scintific knowledge that can be gleaned from a trackway discovered in place is infinitely more valuable than a random footprint on a rock which may have been washed down an arroyo and deposited millions of years out of geologic context.
MacDonald tenaciously found and uncovered not just one, but hundreds of trackways.
Then came the quest for vindication by the nation's leading museums, the web of political intrigue which wrapped around government agencies and local naysayers, and the inevitable cries of "fraud".
In the end, the MacDonald trackway discovery was recognized by the Smithsonian and Carnegie museums as the most significant Permian discovery in North America, yielding voluminous data about the creatures that lived along the then tropical shores of the great Southwest ocean 50 million years before dinosaurs roamed the land.
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Cordially,