Dinosaur Tracks

The dinosaur tracks in Sucre, Bolivia is a definite must see attraction. Located about 6 km outside of Sucre, the small mountain of Cal Orck'o is home to the world's largest collection of dinosaur tracks. There are about 5,000 impressions of dinosaur footprints from at least 250 different dinosaurs that are embedded on a gigantic, near-vertical limestone rock.

The dinosaur footprints were first discovered in 1994 by workers from the local Sucre cement factory. When the cement workers were clearing the grounds, they uncovered a nearly vertical limestone face bearing thousands of dinosaur footprints.

The footprints are scattered across a gigantic, greyish rock covering about 25,000 square meters (about the size of several soccer fields) and are about 100 meters high. At first the prints just look like holes in the rock. But, after you study them for a while, you'll see the clear footprints of many different sizes running in long lines across the surface of the rock. For, example, some of the dinosaur footprints you'll see are of Tyrannosaurus (T-Rex), Brontosaurus, and Triceratops.

It is neat just to gaze upon the tracks for a while and envision which dinosaurs were doing what when they walked through this area millions of years ago. Some of the sets of footprints may have been the scene of a chase and kill by predators.

Experts believe the footprints in the rocks date back some 60 million years, which is before the Andes were formed. Supposedly, there was a lake here surrounded by a forest and dinosaurs would have trudged through the mud in the forest toward the lake in search of water. Before the tracks had a chance to disappear, the tracks would have been covered by sediment, which settled over the mud and preserved the footprints.