Poison Spider Dinosaur Tracksite Trail

90 million years ago the area around what is now Moab was covered in huge sand dunes. Between dune fields were scattered flat areas of wet sand, shallow ponds, and small streams. Dinosaurs crossed these flats and left their footprints, which were sometimes then covered by the shifting dunes and preserved intact. Millions of years later, after the sands had turned to stone, blocks containing the tracks have fallen out of the cliffs above and split along the bedding planes, exposing the tracks to the sun once again. Two rock slabs with footprints are visible from the parking lot, one at the base of the cliffs and another halfway down the slope, just above the cliff that drops down to the road. The lower of these slabs contains the tracks of at least 10 different meat-eating dinosaurs, ranging in size from 17 inches to nearly 5 feet at the hips. All the animals appear to have been walking at speeds of around 3 miles/hour. The parking lot and the lower slopes here are on the Kayenta Formation, but the blocks with the tracks on them have fallen down from the overlying Navajo Sandstone cliffs.