A therizinosaur track in Denali National Park discovered by David Tomeo.

Photo by David Tomeo.

A couple of summers ago, David Tomeo was exploring a creekbed in Denali National Park, preparing for a field seminar on the park’s dinosaurs he would help lead a few weeks later. With a trained eye for the impressions dinosaurs pressed into mud millions of years ago, Tomeo walked to a large boulder in the middle of a landslide.

“Right in the middle of it, a four-toed track stood out,” said Tomeo, program director for Alaska Geographic at the Murie Science and Learning Center in Denali Park.

From left, Yoshi Kobayashi, Tony Fiorillo and Tom Adams in the Wrangell Mountains near where they discovered dinosaur tracks.

Photo courtesy Tony Fiorillo.

The more Tony Fiorillo explores Alaska, the more dinosaur tracks he finds on its lonely ridgetops. The latest examples are the stone footprints of two different dinosaurs near the tiny settlement of Chisana in the Wrangell
Mountains.

The newly discovered Alaska dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, on what was Alaska’s North Slope about 70 million years ago.

Illustration by Karen Carr (http://www.karencarr.com/).

There’s a new kind of dinosaur out there, and it lived in Alaska.

Its bones, long turned to stone, are part of a cliff in northern Alaska. That’s where dinosaur-hunter Tony Fiorillo brushed dirt away from a portion of its massive skull – something that most of us would mistake for a rock.