"Dustin Stewart has been obsessed with dinosaurs since he was nine years old. But he never dreamed he'd grow up to study 70-million-year-old footprints in Alaska.
Scientists have found dinosaur tracks in the Denali National Park before, but never anything on this scale.
Stewart, a paleontologist and graduate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), says there are thousands of newly found prints crawling up vertical walls "like Spider-Man."
"Seeing that for the first time, oh, we were on the next level. Unbelievable. Everyone was excited," he told As it Happens guest host Paul Hunter. "[They were like] 'Oh, my God, look at that one; look at that one.'"
Stewart is a lead author of the study that analyzed what researchers say is the largest known dinosaur track site in Alaska. He worked alongside Patrick Druckenmiller, the director of the Museum of the North in Fairbanks. The findings were published last month in the journal Historical Biology.
Stewart and his team set out to learn more after hearing about the site from national park employees, who first noticed some of the tracks in 2015 on a rocky outcrop researchers have since dubbed the Coliseum.
After hiking for seven or eight hours, he said they weren't very enthusiastic about what they found at first.
"We were exhausted, and we were seeing there [was a] wall that had some dinosaur tracks on it. But not [as many as] we were kind of expecting," he said.
However, when the sun started setting and "hit this perfect angle" on the wall, he says they saw dozens of tracks — and then hundreds, and thousands more.
"Immediately all of us were just flabbergasted, and then Pat said, 'Get your camera.' We were freaking out.""
