I'm June Simms. On our show this week, we play music from "Red" by Taylor Swift and "R.E.D." from Ne-Yo. We also look at two new movies... But first, we tell you about a man who looks for evidence of ancient creatures in the national capital area. Dinosaur Tracker Most people who live and work near Washington, DC, would have trouble imagining dinosaurs walking around the area. But fossil-hunter Ray Stanford can. He believes dinosaurs were in the area as recently as a hundred million years ago. His proof is dinosaur foot prints. He found them in fossils that he collected from around the nation's capital. Christopher Cruise tells us about Mr. Stanford's explorations and finds. Ray Stanford is walking along a small stream in College Park, Maryland, near Washington, DC. "Wait, we got one here. This is from a flesh-eating dinosaur. This is from a theropod dinosaur. You can see where the toenails were." He says he knows these are dinosaur fossils based on his knowledge and experience -- he began hunting for fossil footprints in nineteen ninety-three. "Really my children did. They took interest in dinosaurs and we got a book about dinosaur tracks. And once we looked at it -- we were in a streambed -- we began to discover dinosaur tracks. At first I couldn't believe it." Since then, Ray Stanford has collected more than a thousand footprints from many different kinds of dinosaurs. He says he has made part of his home into a place he calls the "Stanford Museum." He has given some of the fossils he found to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. They are shown in the "Dinosaurs in Our Backyard" show. Matthew Carrano is the museum's curator. |