Coal Miners Dug Into a Mountain in Canada — They Exposed a Wall of 10,000 Dinosaur Tracks

Ancient Canada reveals one of the most extraordinary dinosaur tracksites ever exposed: a massive wall of rock near Grande Cache, Alberta, covered with thousands of footprints left behind roughly 90 million years ago. The tracks were uncovered as open-pit coal mining cut into the mountains north of Grande Cache. Instead of dinosaur skeletons, miners exposed enormous slabs of ancient rock covered in trackways — surfaces that had once been flat, muddy ground during the Early Cretaceous. More than 20 tracksites have been identified across the former Smoky River Coal Mine, and researchers estimate that well over 10,000 individual footprints are preserved there. At one site alone, known as W3 Main, approximately 10,000 tracks have been recorded. The footprints belong to several different kinds of animals. Many were made by heavily armoured nodosaurid dinosaurs, while others came from large and small theropods and ancient birds. Some surfaces preserve long trackways showing animals walking repeatedly across the same muddy landscape. Today those ancient walking surfaces no longer lie flat. Geological forces tilted the rock layers until some of the track-bearing surfaces now stand at angles of roughly 40 to 60 degrees, creating enormous walls covered in dinosaur footprints. These tracks preserve something bones rarely can: movement. They show where dinosaurs walked, how they crossed the landscape, which animals shared the same ground, and how heavily some parts of the ancient environment were used. In this video, we explore how coal mining exposed one of Canada's largest dinosaur tracksites, why thousands of footprints ended up preserved together, what kinds of dinosaurs made them, and how a flat Cretaceous mudflat became a towering wall of tracks in the Canadian Rockies. #AncientCanada #CanadaHistory #Dinosaurs #PrehistoricCanada #Paleontology ⚠️ Some visuals are illustrative. Certain materials may be used under Fair Use for commentary and educational purposes.