Footprints in the Snow: How Science Helped Turn Tragedy to Triumph

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That's the next part of our story. The next thing that happens is we start to erode away our part of the world

This is great because you can see the footprints very clearly now. So you can imagine a dinosaur stomping across the ground but Connor has come up with a question that I don't know the answer to. Connor what was your question? Just like coincidence. Maybe we need to find some more and then we can be sure that it's definitely a dinosaur footprint and not just--Let me feel. So it goes in like that-- Shall we try and get the water out? Here's what I'm thinking though - this could just be three dips in the ground couldn't it. The lake and its lush surrounding vegetation attracted not only humans but also many now-extinct species such as plant-eating ancient camels, mammoths and ground sloths. Predators, like American lions and dire wolves, enjoyed good living here as well. Footprints can’t tell us who these prehistoric humans were. Yet a new study suggests something very surprising about this group. They were living in what’s now New Mexico likely during the Ice Age some 23,000 years ago—thousands of years earlier than the ancestors of modern Native Americans are generally believed to have arrived on the continent. Michael Waters, an archaeologist who directs the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, isn’t convinced that the footprints are as old as the suggested dates.

And you can see this one here. And these toes down here yeah. It's much better when you're down at my height, I must admit. So yeah it's really good this one. We're gonna recreate a dinosaur footprint here, we've got our muddy riverbank and we've got our dinosaur foot. Scarlett, can you bring that in? Right, and then we need to stomp on it and create a footprint. Nice. Alright so lift it out. Let's see what we've got. Alright, we've got a nice footprint there. Waters suspects that the seed ages are unreliable. He notes that several studies suggest they could be off by 7,000 or 8,000 years. He believes that pollen dating is difficult and similarly fraught with potential errors. USGS’s Springer says the study can only raise intriguing questions about who these people were, how they ended up at White Sands and what eventually happened to them. But, she notes, many more clues are likely awaiting discovery. This is Scalby Bay near Scarborough in North Yorkshire and not many people know this but it's one of the best places in Britain to find something amazing that was made millions of years ago. The footprints of dinosaurs but first we need to find some.Yeah. Oh, so you might leave a three-toed footprint behind. And we are no more than 25m away from your very first dinosaur footprints. So as that settles down we build up a layer actually down in our lid down here, if I move my hand it's a bit easier to see. We're gonna fill our lid up with the sand. There it comes you can see its coming up there. And that's what's happening in our ocean. So all of this is falling down to the sea bed The prints are located in the Tularosa Basin, a desert area home to the world’s largest stretch of gypsum sand dunes, which cover some 275 square miles. But tens of thousands of years ago, during the last Ice Age, the ecosystem was dramatically different. Then, the basin was home to prairie-like grasslands, stands of conifer trees and a large body of water known as Lake Otero.