This non-fictional story has all the attributes of a detective: both numerous victims, the secret of whose death has not yet been revealed, and skilled investigators - experts armed with the latest scientific methods … Its unusualness is that the investigation began only 70 million years after the tragedy! And it was too grandiose - we are talking about the death of millions, about the death of the population of the whole planet. With the concept of "dinosaur" we associate something cumbersome, hopelessly outdated. 135 years ago, the English paleontologist Richard Owen named the reptiles that lived on Earth in the Mesozoic.
Yes, that was the time of the reptiles. Strange lizards inhabited prehistoric forests and meadows, swarmed in the seas and lakes, and hovered in the air. They lived on all continents, and their number was measured in many millions. Among them were small creatures the size of a rabbit; there were also giants, whose body length reached 27 m, weight - 70 tons (ultrasaurs). Many walked on four legs, others walked on their hind legs, leaning on a powerful tail. Peaceful giants, devouring tons of grass, and mighty predators as high as a three-story building - “brainless combat vehicles of terrible power and merciless ferocity,” in the words of I. A. Efremov …
Their "world domination" lasted for almost 135 million years. According to the unanimous opinion of experts, they had no competitors - there was still no man, no large mammals, or birds on Earth. All ecological niches were occupied by dinosaurs. As I. L. Efremov notes, "the Mesozoic was an era of gloomy reaction … which slowed down the progress of the animal world."
But now the Cretaceous period ends, and with it the entire Mesozoic era.
And the incredible happens - dinosaurs disappear! Colossi and pygmies, land, sea and flying. Every single one, leaving no descendants! Of the 16 huge detachments of reptiles that inhabited the Earth in the Mesozoic, only five have survived to this day: crocodiles, lizards, snakes, turtles and a tuatara.
As the paleontologist D, G. Simpson wrote, “the most mysterious event in the history of the Earth is the transition from the Mesozoic, the age of reptiles, to the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. The impression is as if during a performance in which all the main roles were played by reptiles and, in particular, crowds of a wide variety of dinosaurs, the curtain fell for a moment and immediately rose again, revealing the same scenery, but completely new actors - not a single dinosaur, other reptiles in the background as extras, and in the main roles - mammals, which were not even mentioned in the previous actions."
The extinction of dinosaurs took place on all continents and in all natural zones at once. The disappearance of marine reptiles is especially mysterious. They had no natural enemies - aquatic mammals appeared much later, moving from land to the ocean, already "cleared" of dinosaurs by that time. Marine reptiles were very mobile, ate mainly fish, many of them (say, ichthyosaurs) were viviparous. All this made them very “protected” from any climatic, geological or environmental disasters.
The "Great Extinction" of dinosaurs did not happen overnight, of course, but nevertheless, by geological standards, almost instantly. The so-called "death fields" of dinosaurs are known in Central Asia. In some areas along the foothills of the Tien Shan, there are giant accumulations of bones of these lizards - the remains of millions and millions of individuals. IA Efremov, who led the excavations in Mongolia (see "TM" No. 3 for 1982), noted that often in burials one can find skeletons of old animals and young animals at the same time. This could only have happened as a result of some sudden catastrophe. And in the Paleocene, dinosaur remains are no longer found …
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With the disappearance of dinosaurs, mammals did more than just find "living space." There was a powerful outbreak of the evolutionary development of this class of animals. On the planet freed from lizards, chimerical animals appeared, as if combining the features of many modern groups of mammals. Predators with hooves and herbivores with claws and sharp fangs, elephant-like giants with several pairs of horns … Only after millions of years, in the process of natural selection, after the change of countless generations, the most adapted groups of animals emerged and developed. At the final stage, from one such group - primates - man stood out: a creature capable of thinking. The time has come, and he thought: why, in fact, did the dinosaurs become extinct?
Many paleontologists believe the reason is "competition". Dinosaurs were supposedly driven out of the face of the earth by mammals. But how did they do it? Small in number and small, they could not destroy dinosaurs either physically or by eating their food. A higher level of organization, in particular, of the central nervous system, by itself, does not prove anything. If each developed form supplanted the simpler ones, then at present only the most highly developed animals would live on Earth. But this is obviously not the case. And if someone was ousted or exterminated, then rather it was done by dinosaurs in relation to warm-blooded ones throughout the 135 million years of their "dominion".
The second group of hypotheses operates with geological and climatic factors. In the Mesozoic, supporters of such hypotheses believe, there were no high mountains, the main element of the landscape was swampy lowlands, the climate was enviable mild. At the end of the Cretaceous period, when powerful orogenic processes began, the relief and climate of the planet became more contrasting. A change of vegetation has taken place: the era of angiosperms has come. So the dinosaurs died out, either unable to withstand climatic changes (some authors believe from a cold snap, others from overheating), or failing to adapt to the changed plant food (among the varieties of this hypothesis there are very extravagant ones - for example, that "terrible lizards" were poisoned by alkaloids contained in new plant species).
But didn't the physical and geographical conditions on Earth change during the Mesozoic? Periodically, the coastline shifted over vast expanses of continents, the earth's flora underwent significant changes, but the dinosaurs adapted and prospered. As for the supposed cooling at the Mesozoic-Cenozoic boundary, geologists do not find any signs of it.
The development of vast glaciers in the middle and high latitudes began much later, when there were no dinosaurs. And all these changes in climate and relief, even if they did occur, could not affect marine reptiles in any way.
It has been suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs was a consequence of a cosmic catastrophe - for example, a nearby supernova. According to D. Russell's calculations, such flares (less than 100 light years from the Sun) can occur on average every 50 million years.
Such an explosion should have unleashed a shower of gamma rays on the Earth, destructive not only for dinosaurs, but also for other animals, including mammals. But the latter, as we know, not only survived, but began to multiply and develop very rapidly …
We will not dwell on other hypotheses about the reasons for the "great extinction" (epidemics, devouring dinosaur eggs by other animals, excessive specialization of the organism, reorientation of the Earth's magnetic field, etc.) - they all try to explain the mystery by some one factor that could not be comprehensive. Let's try to approach it from the standpoint of forensic science. Even the ancient Romans, considering an intricate crime, wondered: who benefits from it?
Mammals, including the distant ancestors of modern humans, have directly benefited from the extinction of dinosaurs. The rapid development of mammals began only with the disappearance of dinosaurs "from the scene."
But who could have helped mammals bring about the "great biological revolution"? After all, they, as already noted, were too weak and few in number. However, there are a number of mysterious facts, as if hinting at a hypothetical possibility: an outside (intentional?) Interference in the fate of dinosaurs …
In 1945, the Mexican merchant Valdemar Julsrud, riding on horseback in the vicinity of the city of Acambaro, saw a place where heavy rains had washed away the soil and exposed some kind of clay products. An enthusiastic collector of antiquities, he took with him one of the figurines he found, and later, hiring the local potter Odilon Tinajero and his two sons, instructed them to collect everything they could. The find turned out to be an unusually rich collection of pottery and figurines. By 1952. Dzhulsrud collected more than thirty thousand of them.
All the figurines, some of which were one meter in height, were molded of baked clay. They portrayed both people and animals, and among them there were no repetitions. The overwhelming majority of the figurines depicted animals unknown to science or … long extinct. Including dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, brontosaurs.
G. Buslaev, candidate of historical sciences, commenting on an article by the French researcher R. Willis (see "TM" 1 for 1971), did not exclude the possibility of counterfeiting the collection of Dzhulsrud. However, in 1972, three clay figurines were examined in the laboratory of the Pennsylvania Museum using the thermoluminescent method. “We were so dumbfounded by the unexpectedly ancient age of these figurines,” writes the head of the laboratory R. Fröhlich, “that Mark Gahn decided to do 18 tests with each of the figurines with his own hand, and this is already a very serious test. All three figurines gave the same date: 2500 BC. e. The laboratory found it possible to extend this dating to the entire collection of V. Dzhulsrud."
In addition, Professor Hapgood, who was studying the finds, found that similar figurines were found not only in Acambaro.
Identical figures were offered to tourists by residents of the town of San Miguel Allende near Acambaro. They found figurines in the pyramids located in this area.
Similar images of long-extinct animals - dinosaurs, brontosaurs, brachiosaurs and others - are also found on the sensational "black stones of Ica" (see "TM" 7 for 1975). Their discoverer, the Peruvian surgeon Luis Cabrera, who collected more than 15 thousand "black stones", of course, was also accused of falsification. But the studies carried out seem to prove the authenticity of the drawings. Moreover, it has been established that as early as 1926, the Jesuit monk Pedro Simon wrote about the “black stones of Ica”. And after a while it became known that Peruvian archaeologists had the first of them … back in the 19th century.
But who could have seen the long-extinct "terrible lizards"? Who portrayed them with amazing accuracy? The age of the finds has been established, but four and a half thousand years ago these animals did not exist either! It seems that the clusters of figurines and stones with images indicate a kind of "stone libraries" collected by the ancient inhabitants of South and Central America. Moreover, the stones from Ica are most likely copies made from the original that has not come down to us. But who created the original and where is it?..
There is another series of findings that can shed light on the problem of interest to us. So, in the channel of the Palaxy River in Texas, clear fossilized dinosaur tracks have been preserved (the river bottom in this place existed in the Cretaceous period). And right there, very close by, human footprints were found! It even seems that a man was chasing this dinosaur …
American paleontologist KN Dougherty has established that here, in the so-called "Valley of the Giants", there are hundreds of paw prints of various species of lizards - and everywhere near them there are human footprints!
The Palaxi River tracks are not the only example. Back in 1931, the American geologist G. Burru reported on the finds of human footprints in layers that were … 250 million years old! He found ten such tracks a few miles northwest of Mount Vernon. But 25O million years ago there were no mammals, not even dinosaurs! Another fake? But Burrou's photographs prove irrefutably that where the soles usually exert the most pressure, the grains of sand are compressed more than between the toes and under the arch of the foot. The mysterious hoaxer could not change the structure of the sandstone! No, these five-toed prints are absolutely indisputable evidence of a human foot 24 cm long and 10 cm wide.
It seems that there are only two explanations for all these sensational findings. First, a certain underground organization of forgers has been fabricating numerous traces and images all over the world for many years with the sole purpose of hitting the scientific world. And the second …
What if the roots of human history stretch back much further than the most daring experts think? After all, if ancient people coexisted with dinosaurs for some time and did not consider it necessary to enter them into the Red Book, they would have had a very hard time.
However, the investigation continues …
And yet dinosaurs, in all likelihood, fell victim to an attack from space.
… “Everyone in their places! - the command was distributed. - Threatening collision!"
There were calls. Sirens howled. Willis and Clive, cursing, rushed to remove the katta emergency helmets and space suits from the walls.
… A meteorite pierced the ship in a billionth of a second. Air poured into the hole he had punched.
Oh my God, Willis thought, Clive will never return.
Willis was rescued by the ladder, near which he stood: the rapid flow of air, flowing into space, firmly poured it to her … For a few moments he could neither move nor breathe. Then there was no air in the ship at all. Willis only had time to adjust the pressure in a spacesuit and a helmet and look wildly around. In the ship, now deviated from the course, more and more holes appeared, as in a space battle.
… The last of the flying horde of meteorites hit the two-gage compartment, and from this impact the ship was torn to pieces.
Outside, he saw how it exploded, as if a balloon had burst, the inner compartment. Together with the debris, people flew in different directions in maddened flocks.
Goodbye, Willis thought. But I didn't really have to say goodbye to anyone. He did not hear anyone crying or moaning on the radio. He is the only one of the crew who survived, because only his spacesuit, only his helmet, only his oxygen survived by some miracle."
A collision with a meteorite, as can be seen from the vivid description of Ray Bradbury, threatens disaster. And the more massive the meteorite, the more trouble. Obviously, for each spaceship, arbitrarily large, you can pick up such a cosmolite ("space stone") so that the crew would share the mournful lot of the heroes of Bradbury's story.
Even if the ship is our Earth, and its crew are dinosaurs.
Many tons of meteorite matter, mainly in the form of cosmic dust, invade the upper atmosphere every day. Microscopic particles, rushing at a breakneck speed, heat up, flare up in instant "shooting stars" and burn out safely. Thick air "armor" reliably protects us from larger aliens from space. And those that all the same reach the surface lose all their strength along the way and, as a rule, do not cause any damage.
However, it all depends on the size of the falling body. In addition, the concept of "damage" is still very subjective. Meteorites constantly pierce the Earth and leave scars and abrasions on it. The fact that the largest of them usually fall on sparsely populated areas proves only one thing: there are not so many people on Earth as the heralds of the "ecological catastrophe" are trying to imagine.
Large meteorites bombard the Earth quite regularly. "Sikhote-Alin rain", "Tunguska miracle" … A few years ago, another "heavenly shell" pierced the atmosphere over the island of Madagascar. Having entered the dense layers, it split into two parts, one of which "landed" 100 km west of the Malagdsi capital Antananarivo. The second fragment fell further from the city - 400 km to the south, but dug a crater 240 m in diameter! For clarity, it is useful to imagine the amphitheater of the Great Sports Arena …
An even more noticeable "dent" is the famous Diablo Canyon in Ariyun. The funnel (its diameter is 1207 m, depth is 124 m) is formed by a meteorite weighing one megaton. Tourists pay dollars to see the classic 'lunar crater'.
And on the coast of the Laptev Sea lies the round Popigai depression, the diameter of which is about 100 km. Probably, a "shell" of a kilometer caliber landed here at one time. the energy released during the fall was a million times higher than the power of the Tunguska explosion.
The language does not dare to call such a body a “meteorite”. Millions and millions of tons of mass, dimensions measured in kilometers … These are no longer “shooting stars”, these are “falling planets”! Some scientists believe that it was just such a "superbomb" that wiped out the mythical Atlantis from the face of the Earth (see "TM" 6 for 1981).
A similar reason led to the Ibel of the dinosaurs. At least, according to the Nobel Prize laureate American physicist Luis Alarez. According to his hypothesis, 65 million meters ago, a “falling planet” with a diameter of about 10 km fell on the North Atlantic, breaking through the earth's crust. It turns out that the citizens of Iceland should literally “thank the sky”: their skeleton is formed by volcanic pores, expelled from the depths of the earth through the resulting “hole” …
However, why only Icelanders? Huge clouds of dust, born of the monstrous explosion, made the atmosphere almost opaque to sunlight for many years. This led to a sharp cooling, dinosaurs became extinct, ecological niches were vacated, and mammals entered the arena. And after a few tens of millions of years, evolution produced man.
Many scientists support Alvarez's hypothesis. It was built - on a very solid experimental foundation - in the geological layers corresponding to the end of the Cretaceous period, the concentration of some rare chemical elements on Earth is abnormally high. Including iridium, which is often found in certain types of meteorites …
So the mystery of the death of the dinosaurs seems to have found a very plausible explanation. But, as usually happens, the solution of one problem entails the emergence of another. After all, the Earth, of course, is not guaranteed against new collisions with the "falling planets". And humanity, in order to survive, is obliged to find some measures to prevent a possible catastrophe.
A person is unlikely to learn in the foreseeable future to make a relatively rapid change in the earth's orbit in order to avoid a catastrophic collision. It is less difficult to be towed to the distant boundaries of the near-earth space of small (with a diameter of a kilometer and a half) "guard asteroids". When a giant "supermeteorite" approaches the Earth at a given point of its trajectory, a stone suicide bomber will wait for it, who must die, but turn away the uninvited alien.
But the English astrophysicist Fred Hoyle believes that it is impossible to prevent the fall of giant meteorites. However, he is far from pessimism. Hoyle thinks he is in charge; the danger is global cooling, and therefore suggests … to accumulate thermal energy due to the warming up of the World Ocean! To do this, you need to gradually pump cold water from the depths to the surface layers.
This process, according to Hoyle, does not require an external supply of energy. The pumps will be driven by the transfer of heat from surface waters to cold water continuously rising from the depths of the ocean. As a result, in two thousand years the thermal reserve of the ocean will increase thirtyfold, and the Earth will become invulnerable to glaciation. Recently in the West, more and more separate voices have been heard, anathematizing scientific and technological progress, calling "back to nature." But only the achievements of science and technology can serve as a guarantee that our civilization will not suffer the sad fate of the tribe of Mesozoic reptiles.
When the rays of the rising sun touched the crowns of the giant cypress trees, the humid and hot air shuddered from the heavy blows on the water. The powerful trumpet sounds fluttered the long, several meters, glossy leathery leaves of a cycad, somewhat reminiscent of a palm tree, and from there a winged lizard flew up with a frightened cry. Gliding from tree to tree, he rushed to the edge of the swamp, which was framed by ginkgo forests. The leaves of these trees loomed against the cloudless sky in huge fans, and it was easier to hide from danger in them.
But then the dense green wall swayed, parted, and a dinosaur came out to the swamp. Om moved on powerful hind legs, striking the water evenly with his strong tail. The flat and elongated head, completing a long neck, seemed to consist of only two jaws, studded with sharp teeth. The fifteen-meter monster moved its underdeveloped limbs, looked around and, picking up the sprouts of a young fern, headed straight towards the ginkgo forest, followed by a second predator, a third …
- What are you thinking about, Kurban Nepetovich?.. - someone's voice brought me back to the present. Eyes were blinded by the bright sun, which here, in the Khojapil tract, a mountainous and bare area, is always in abundance.
- Yes, I watched … the dinosaurs, - I answer, looking around the members of the expedition, ready to continue their journey after a short rest. - Imagined how they walked around here.
- Yes, we took a walk, - said Vitaly Ivanovich Plutalov, who came up. - We have drawn a whole map of the “routes” of the dinosaurs. In this respect, the Kugitanpau ridge is simply unique …
This is the third expedition conducted by the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of the Turkmen SSR in the Khojapil-ata region. Until recently, traces of Cretaceous reptiles that lived about 100 million years ago were known in our country only in the Rawat Gorge, on the Babatag Ridge in Tajikistan and on Mount Sataplia, northwest of Kutaisi in Georgia.
And not so long ago, traces of Jurassic dinosaurs, which lived on Earth 150 million years ago, were found in Uzbekistan. But the largest number of Upper Jurassic traces - both in our country and throughout the world - falls on Turkmenistan. They were found on the western slope of Kugitangtau, near the village of Khojapil-ata. If we translate this name from Turkmen, we get: “footprints of the elephants of the holy grandfather”. According to legend, huge footprints on the plateau more than two thousand years ago were left by the elephants of the troops of Alexander the Great.
To date, in the Khojapil-ata region, the length of all known trace-bearing sites is 10 km. More than 4,000 tracks were found on the slopes of the ridge. There are 1365 well-pronounced prints on the Central area of the “route” of ancient animals alone. On Sary-Kaya (Verkhnee), 22 lines of 360 tracks were traced. On the Rostovskaya site, which was opened by a group of students from Rostov State University under the guidance of Professor V. I. Sedletsky, there are more than 400 prints. This number of tracks of the Upper Jurassic dinosaurs was first discovered on our planet and has no analogues.
Best of all, the ice was preserved at the Tsentralnaya site, to the west of Khojapil-ata, where together with V. Plutalov, O. Gorbachev and other members of the expedition we drew up a map-scheme of the “routes” of dinosaurs. The site is over 500 m long and about 200 m wide.
Here we have found Zb chains of tracks of different directions and lengths. There were also parallel ones: probably, some animals “walked” in pairs.
Having studied more than 4000 footprints of Upper Jurassic dinosaurs of various individuals, we identified three types of them that belonged to animals that we attributed to new genera: Turkmenosaurus, Hodjapilosaurus, and Hissarosaurus. The first was apparently a two-legged giant with three massive petal stubby toes. It is characteristic that the heel width of a rounded elephant-like foot is at least half the length of the track. But in Hodjapilosaurus on three-toed legs, the fingers are elongated, long, the middle one protrudes significantly forward, but the latter is always shorter than the first. The wedge-shaped heel tapers towards the back of the track, its width does not exceed one third of the track length of the animal.
Hissarosaurus, a bipedal, but already four-fingered dinosaur, has a rectangular heel, wide. Deeply depressed tracks, rarely found on the plateau.
We also found a two-toed track, but such a find is not an isolated case. Earlier in the Lower Jurassic deposits of the central part
Vysoko Atlas (Morocco), small two- and three-toed footprints were found: presumably they belong to small and carnivorous dinosaurs - coelurosaurs.
A little higher up the slope of the Kugitangtau ridge, we discovered a large accumulation of small three-toed footprints, which is why we named the site Children's …
The sun is burning more and more, the frozen giant footprints in the stone firmament of the plateau lead us further. Most of them are three-toed and belong, apparently, to dinosaurs that walked on the unhardened shallow ground - signs of the surf on the surface of the track site are well preserved. Most of the bipedal dinosaurs belonging to the subclass of archosaurs walked here. We carefully describe, measure and photograph each footprint. Their sizes in different lines are not the same. The largest are 86 cm long and 73 cm wide.
Small ones - 23 and 21 cm, respectively. Average stride length - 220, the smallest - 105 cm.
“However, they walked evenly,” Plutalov says thoughtfully. -The tracks in the lines are almost equidistant from each other.
“There is one more interesting detail,” I note. - Look, on almost all tracks the toes are pressed more strongly than the heels.
This leads us to believe that the animal moved fairly quickly. But then my attention was attracted by not very clear small indentations on the plateau slightly away from the flower of dinosaur tracks, stretching parallel to them. One glance at the dents was enough to understand that these tracks did not belong to lizards. But then to whom? True, one of the integers, the most distinct, seemed to resemble … I looked at the puzzled silent employees and immediately guessed that they were thinking the same - the petrified imprint was clearly similar to the trace of … a bare human foot. No, it would be more correct to say - the feet of a humanoid creature.
“The length is twenty-six centimeters,” Vitaly Ivanovich said after measuring the track.
- Approximately forty-third shoe size, - picks up Oleg. -It comes out, not so hot … Don't forget to photograph, - I stop them. - It is too early to draw conclusions.
Are our ancestors modern-day dinosaurs? I could not take my eyes off this trace. The forefoot 10 cm wide is well defined, there are rounded depressions that resemble toes: big, index, middle … In the middle of the foot of the right leg there is a narrowing, a heel is rounded 5 cm wide. We found other tracks, their length reached 30 cm, heels were narrower, and the foot itself was wide. Yes, and the big toe was longer, and the rest shrank towards the little finger. Yes, if the discovered traces really belong to a humanoid creature, then the history of mankind will begin not 5 or 10, but 150 million years. Indeed, in the Pelaxi River Valley in Texas (USA), the so-called "human footprints" were found, adjacent to the footprints of dinosaurs. It even seems that this "man" was chasing a huge lizard.
As established by the American paleontologist K. Dougherty, in the Texas Valley of the Giants there were hundreds of dinosaur footprints, and next to them were everywhere the prints of “bare feet”. In 1931, the American geologist H. Burru reported on the imprints of "human feet" trapped in layers that are 250 million years old! He found ten more such tracks a few miles northwest of Mount Vernon. Could it be a fake? But in the photographs taken by G. Burru, it is very clearly seen that where the soles usually exert the greatest pressure, the sands are pressed more strongly than between the toes and under the arch of the foot …
It was too early for us to draw any conclusions. It is dangerous to draw conclusions on the study of single traces. But we believed that traces of the strange creature would still be found. And our hopes were justified. On May 11, 1987 the mountain together with the geologist Zagorodnev we examined the Sary-Kaya-Vostochny site. Here, for the first time, they found traces of that very "humanoid" creature, its right and left legs. The depth of their indentation into the ground turned out to be quite impressive - more than 6 cm, and the distance from the heel of the left leg to the phalangeal part of the right was almost 80 cm. Apparently, this "humanoid" was rather big and could well, together with its relatives, fight against diiosaurs.
Luck inspired us, and the next day we made a detailed mapping of the Sary-Kaya site. The results were stunning, although the site itself is located 2 km west of Central and significantly higher up the slope. But it was here that we counted about 1000 footprints in numerous “walking” chains. By lunchtime, 15 chains were examined, but when we moved on to the next, we were seized with confusion - elongated giant footprints in the shape of a pumpkin or an electric light bulb. It would be too daring to call them the tracks of a "human-like" creature, but I also could not attribute these strange prints to the tracks of dinosaurs: they were sharply different in form from those previously known. And at the same time, it is impossible to classify them as random. There are a lot of such "pumpkins", most of them are pronounced and stretch for tens of meters. Only in the sixteenth chain of traces of "humanlike" we found 38 prints of unknown origin, in three others - more than 30 such traces. But if the footprints were not left by dinosaurs and not by our "humanlike", then by whom? There was something to puzzle over.
The finds of the next two days completely baffled us. Climbing higher and higher along the squabble of the ridge, we unexpectedly discovered a new platform with chains of traces of the “humanoid”, and with them strange “pumpkins”, which, no doubt, could already be called gigantic. For the description, we divided each footprint into the upper part - the phalanx and the lower part - the heel. Basically, the length of the print was 66 cm. Half of this distance, or even more, fell on the heel, the width of which was 13 cm. But most of all, the stride length of the mysterious creature was impressive - from 18O to 210 cm. Such giants could really enter into single combat with dinosaurs! But the absence of fingerprints in the tracks suggested that the unknown creatures could not be attributed to humanoid. An unknown species of Diiosaurus? When I told Academician V. E. Khain about the preliminary results, he jokingly suggested calling the creatures anthroposaurs.
It seems that finding out who these strange footprints belong to, a dinosaur or some other unknown giant, is a task for the near future. Therefore, we named the track site we found Nadezhda.
Short messages about the findings of traces of the "humanoid" flashed on the pages of central newspapers, and some time later I received a letter from the USA with the following content:
Dear Sirs!
A Sydney newspaper dated November 27, 1983 published a TASS report that about 1,500 dinosaur prints were found in Turkey. Along with prints of footprints of dinosaurs, prints resembling human footprints have been found. Members of our geological team in 1983 near Glen Rose (Texas, USA) excavated footprints of a person and a dinosaur. The tracks were found under a 40 cm layer of chalk and clay (marl) at a distance of two meters from each other.
Notice: The other 4 dinosaur footprints were flat. This summer, our group is going to continue excavations, and if you are interested in the results, we will inform you about them additionally. Considering the above, it would be very interesting for us to learn more about your find and research in this area in exchange for the information you are interested in about our discoveries. We hope that the exchange of such information will be mutually beneficial and extremely fruitful. Yours faithfully … The seriousness of the problem raised is evidenced by the fact that the international project "Dinosaur" has existed for two years already. Extensive research on reptiles and the history of their development is needed. And this will require the efforts of scientists from all over the world. As you know, man appeared 1 - 2 million years ago, and if we talk about primates, then their age is 25 million years. Our "humanoid" creature left its traces in the earth's layers, formed 150 - 160 million years ago.
And one cannot dismiss the version that man descended from dinosaurs, as well as the hypothesis that primitive man was the culprit for the death of dinosaurs 70 million years ago, which was expressed by the Ukrainian scientists R. Furdui and G. Burgansky. There are also quite fantastic assumptions. For example, Y. Pasechnik writes: “The only conclusion can be this: since humanoid beings did not appear on the Earth at that time autonomously, they could appear on it only … from other planets! That is, this fossilized (?) Imprint of a humanlike foot could only belong to the foot of an alien. " And now let us recall the fantastic story of Ivaia Efremov "Starships", which tells about how paleontologists discovered a dinosaur cemetery on the territory of Kazakhstan. Their remains rested in sandy sediments formed in the Cretaceous period,that is, more than 100 million years ago. And many millions of years later, mountains were formed here - they rose later - by the forces of powerful atomic reactions taking place in the depths of the earth's crust. But the radiation could attract stellar aliens in search of atomic energy reserves …
Yes, so far it's fantastic. And we, too, are not going to categorically assert that the prints we found are human traces. Many natural phenomena are still far from being known. And among them is the secret of the Khojapil plateau of dinosaurs.
ROSTISLAV FURDUY, Candidate of Geological and Mneralogical Sciences, GARY BURGANSKY, engineer, Kiev
