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• Plant leaf fossils from the Mesaverde Group are quite common from northeastern <br />Arizona; Salina Canyon, Utah; and southwestern Wyoming (Tidwell 1975). Good leaf <br />fossils can often be found in small shale partings in the sandstones below and above <br />the coal seams. Upper Cretaceous flora from these areas indicate warm, humid, <br />lowland conditions. Plant genera from this flora, that includes at least two genera of <br />palms, suggests a heavy rainfall distributed throughout the year without any frost. <br />Dinosaur footprints have been reported from the Mesaverde Formation at a number of <br />localities in the western United States by at least five different authors, particularly in <br />western Colorado and eastern Utah (Lockley, Young, and Carpenter, 1983). Lockley <br />Young and Carpenter 11983) were able to photograph, measure and document the <br />length width and depth and toe direction of more than eighty distinct three toed <br />footprints in the roof of a coal mine near Gunnison, Colorado. <br />Lockley's investigations were also able to determine that the most likely printmaker.of <br />the most common form of print was the three toed bipedal hadrasatir, a late Cretaceous <br />ornithopod dinosaur. Their observations also suggested that the bipedal hadrasaurs <br />were gregarious and abundant and were walking slowly across a swampy open river <br />floodplain shortly before the river flooded and washed silt and sand into the footprints. <br />While the Mesaverde Formation has produced abundant plant leaf and dinosaur <br />footprint fossils, it has produced virtually no skeletal remains. Thus it is not possible to <br />infer probable track makers from local skeletal evidence. The situation is different in. <br />the Upper Cretaceous rocks of Alberta, Canada; where Campanian and Maastrichtian <br />footprints are abundant and there is a wealth of skeletal material of the same age. <br />The lack of skeletal remains in western Colorado is most likely due to the geochemical <br />environments in coal forming settings (Carpenter 1982) <br />PREVIOUS RESEARCH <br />Prior to the initiation of the field investigations, afile search was conducted of the <br />collections at the University of Colorado in Boulder and of the Denver Museum of <br />Nature and Science in Denver. Both of these searches proved to be negative. <br />A search of the scientific literature in the USGS library at the Federal center in Denver <br />provided several publications that described previous work in this region. The Museum <br />of Western Colorado, Grand Junction, Colorado has several specimens. (Lee and <br />Rowley, 19891 <br />5 <br />