Tracking Dinosaurs With Ray Stanford

East coast dinosaurs are few and far between. Unlike the exposed formations in the western badlands, much of the dinosaur-bearing strata in the eastern states are hidden beneath forests, lawns and parking lots. But you can still find signs of dinosaurs if you know where to look.

Amateur ichnologist Ray Stanford has a knack for finding dinosaur tracks and traces in the Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. area. Among his recent finds are an impression of a baby ankylosaur–on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History–and a track made by an adult of a similar dinosaur on the grounds of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As our paleontology curator Matthew Carrano says in the video above, Stanford’s talent for tracking dinosaurs has helped fill out our understanding of east coast dinosaurs in deposits where bones are scarce.

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Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.