This Utah park's alarming problem: Visitors are throwing dinosaur tracks into the water

[Demovictory9]

Josh Hansen, a state park manager in Utah, heard two distant thunks hit the water as he docked his patrol boat.

He quickly found the source: About 500 yards away, someone was throwing pieces of stone over a cliff and into the reservoir. Hansen sped his boat to the opposite shoreline, just in time to find a boy holding two toe imprints from a partial dinosaur track.

"I saved that one," Hansen told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. "He had already thrown multiple [tracks in the water]."

Opened to the public as a state park in 1988, the nearly 2,000-acre Red Fleet State Park is known for the dinosaur footprints, traces of the towering carnivorous dinosaurs that roamed what is now northeastern Utah about 200 million years ago. But over the past six months, visitors at the park have been dislodging tracks imprinted in the dusty red sandstone and hurling them into the nearby reservoir, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

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Under Utah Code, three-toed dinosaur footprints are treated as fossils, and those who try to destroy are subject to a felony charge. Charges haven't been filed recently, though. In 2001, three Boy Scouts were charged in juvenile court for engaging in the same problem Red Fleet State Park faces today: Tossing dinosaur footprints into its reservoir, the New York Times reported at the time.


Volunteer divers were able to recover about 90 percent of the dinosaur footprints they thought would be lost forever. Now, the park is discussing the possibility of sending a team of divers into the reservoir to do the same thing, Chavez said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/10/ancient-dinosaur-tracks-are-disappearing-at-a-national-park-in-utah-humans-are-to-blame/?utm_term=.1fec8632b6f7

"It's become quite a big problem,” Utah Division of State Parks spokesman Devan Chavez told The Salt Lake Tribune. “They're just looking to throw rocks off the side. What they don't realize is these rocks they're picking up, they're covered in dinosaur tracks."

Although some tracks are very distinct, “just as many are not,” Park Manager Josh Hansen told the parks blog.

http://www.newsweek.com/dinosaurs-red-fleet-state-park-utah-footprints-921474

[Phoenix61]

1. WTF is wrong with people!!!! nt

[Demovictory9]

2. they are just looking for rocks to throw in the water. Don't realize the dino footprints

[CK_John]

3. IMO it is the 6000 age of earth group....

[NightWatcher]

5. That's exactly what I thought too.

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. ignorance is on the rise. these kinds of stories burn me up....no respect for the natural world

human beings are one utterly failed experiment - that is becoming more and more clear