Tracking them is his passion

Ray Stanford pulls into the lot of a fast-food restaurant on a suburban commercial strip and parks at the back. Wearing high rubber boots and carrying a backpack, he makes his way to a stream bank littered with wrappers and cups.

He has come to track dinosaurs.

Stanford, a 69-year-old Texan, has been combing Maryland stream beds for evidence of dinosaurs for the past 13 years. The result is an unprecedented collection of footprints that were left behind 112 million years ago.

Stanford is about the furthest thing possible from a conventional scientist, and his lack of formal training - he has a high school diploma - is just the start.

His first passion, one he still pursues, is Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs); "anomalous aerial objects" is the term he prefers.

Dinosaur tracking was just something he happened on. As it turned out, he has a knack for it. Stanford has found hundreds of tracks in the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore.

They reveal an extraordinary diversity of animals living in one place during the early Cretaceous period. And he has found the fossilised remains of what could be a previously unknown species, a discovery he lovingly refers to as "Cretaceous roadkill".

"I just find things. I don't know why," Stanford says. He has collaborated with PhD holders on papers and is working with the Smithsonian Institute to find a permanent home there for his collection.

Matthew T Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian, is used to getting calls from people who believe they have found dinosaur footprints. More often than not, they are mistaken.

Stanford was different. He made his first dinosaur discovery in 1994. Having read a bit about dinosaurs, he spotted something that looked remarkably like a track while hiking. At first he assumed they were just random patterns. But he kept thinking about them.

"Ray, how hardheaded can you be?" he recalls thinking one day. "Those are iguanodon tracks!"

David Weishampel, a Johns Hopkins paleontologist, says the sheer number of tracks Stanford has found is mind-boggling.

"It's like, why didn't we see it before?" Weishampel says.

When Stanford's wife retires from her job at Nasa, the couple plans to move back to Texas, where Stanford will again devote himself to UFOs.

Published on the web by Pretoria News on January 17, 2008.