Dinosaur footprint found at NASA facility

GREENBELT, Md., Aug. 23 (UPI) -- A look underfoot has found a dinosaur footprint at a NASA facility in Maryland, which mostly looks outward toward the planets and stars, a researcher says.

Dinosaur hunter Ray Stanford has found the footprint of a large spiny dinosaur called a nodosaur in the space agency's own back yard at its Goddard Space Flight Center campus, LiveScience reported Wednesday.

Stanford, an amateur paleontologist, informed Goddard officials Aug. 17 of the location of the 12-inch-wide footprint showing four toes.

NASA officials have not disclosed the exact location of the footprint on the facility's grounds, out of concern someone might damage or try to remove the fossilized evidence of the nodosaur, a lumbering armored beast covered with bony projections.

Stanford called the location where the dinosaur roamed millennia ago during the Cretaceous period "poetic."

"Space scientists may walk along here, and they're walking exactly where this big, bungling heavy-armored dinosaur walked, maybe 110 (million) to 112 million years ago," Stanford told Goddard officials.