Mature Flâneur
Portugal’s Jurassic Park
Fatima’s fossil-footprint playground for sauropods
The little town of Fatima, Portugal, is world famous for a visitation of the Virgin Mary to three children in 1917. But for my money, there’s an even greater miracle nearby: one of the longest dinosaur footprint trails ever discovered was found in 1994 in a limestone quarry, now renamed Pegadas de Dinossáurios da Serra de Aire Natural Monument.
Teresa (my beloved Portuguese spouse) and I had stopped in Fatima for a few days on our way north at an adorable little B&B just three miles from the park. I knew nothing about the dinosaurs until we passed a road sign a few miles from the guesthouse and I picked out the word “Dinossáurios.” My Portuguese is pretty rudimentary, but I could figure out what it meant.
I was excited! Teresa, not so much. And so after a morning spent touring Medieval castles, she indicated she would take a pass if I wanted to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs that afternoon.
“Are you ten years old?”
Now, she did not actually say that out loud; indeed she encouraged me to get out so that she could take a shower and flounce about our guest suite alone. But I know: she thinks a sixty-six year old man need not be quite so keen about dinosaurs. But, oh well, c’est moi.
You can imagine my distress, then, when arriving at the dino-park, I found a guard rail blocking the road, and a sign saying the park was closed till March.
So, I did what any responsible adult would do. I got back in the car, drove home and spent the afternoon doing my taxes. Not! Instead, I did what any rambunctious ten year old would do. I hopped the barrier, clambered over a low wall, and found myself all alone in my private Jurassic Park.
Now, the park is set up to have visitors slowly approach from the top of the former quarry and gradually work their way around the rim to the quarry bottom, where the footprints are. But, absent any brochure or map, I started out in the opposite direction, coming first upon a large wooden walkway across the flat slope of the open quarry.
The quarry bed looked like a massive hockey rink coated with smooth grey ice. It was a couple of hundred meters long, and a hundred or so meters wide. But the “rink” was tilted about ten degrees, so that it sloped gently downhill, ending where it met the “stands” of the limestone quarry walls.
At first I could not see the tracks. Halfway across the walkway, they suddenly jumped out at me. Holy crap!
These were massive prints, bigger than an elephant’s foot. Each one was sunk about two inches into the fossilized sediment. This one trail was 147 meters/482 feet long (so the placard said) and crossed the entire length of the quarry bed.
Now, I can imagine when the park is open, the regulations for visitors are to stay on the wooden path. Though these prints are fossilized in limestone, a lot of people are idiots and would deface the prints with spray paint or try and carve their initials in them. But as I was all alone, I figured there was no harm in slipping over the rails and measuring the size of my own small boot against a sauropod print. So I did:
These babies were big — about 90 cm x 60 cm (roughly 3 feet by 2 feet) Estimated to be 3.6 meters tall (11 feet) at the hip, the dinos that made these prints were four-footed, long-necked species of plant-eaters (though not too far from the park, in the Vale de Meios, there’s a second site of fossil tracks made by two legged theropods — the meat-eating kind).
Of course, in the Jurassic Park movies, we all know what happens when the rambunctious ten year old steps off the prescribed path. Before long, everyone’s screaming and running through the forest with some toothy theropod snapping at their heels.
But, that did not happen to me. Not today, sigh. I simply hopped back on the trail and walked the rest of the way across the quarry. I passed other educational placards that explained how dino-prints fossilize in the mud, how tectonic forces can tilt landscapes like this at odd angles, and how quarrying limestone in this pit removed the layers of rock that covered what would have been a shallow, muddy lagoon 175 million years ago.
The placards were also filled with all the cool stuff that paleontologists learned about sauropods from studying the twenty distinct trails and thousand-odd prints at the site. Some researchers have deduced that some of the tracks were made by species not yet discovered elsewhere!
The path now followed the rim of the quarry, giving me a full view of the vast, excavated space. From there I could see the several tracks of the sauropods all at once. I felt I could envision that ancient lagoon as it was, 175 million years ago.
What a marvel , what a miracle, to have this window into the deep past, 175 million years ago, open for us, and to stand in their footprints.
The vision of Fatima, scarcely 100 years ago, was not believed at first by the priests. But the people believed, so eventually, the church relented. It’s now a major Catholic shrine, visited by six to eight million people every year. But these sauropod footprints are not a matter of faith. They are the record of earth stored in the rocks, open to be read by all.
To me, that is what makes them a miracle.
Tim Ward is the author of Mature Flâneur: Slow Travels Through Portugal, France, Italy and Norway.
Post-script: My dear friend Ann just me news of a new dinosaur find in Portugal:
