Fossilized Human Footprint Found Nestled in a Giant Sloth Footprint
An incredibly preserved set of tracks tell the story of an ancient hunt.
by Ed Yong
Apr 25, 2018
4 minutes
Last April, Matthew Bennett was lying on a white salt flat in New Mexico, uncovering fossilized footprints that had been preserved in the white rock. The print belonged to a ground sloth—a bulky animal, whose large feet and curved claws left apostrophe-shaped impressions wherever it walked. There were many such tracks around, but Bennett found one that was very different.
Inside the outline of the sloth’s 20-inch-long foot was a human footprint.
He looked at the next track in the series and found the same thing—a human footprint, perfectly nestled inside a sloth one. There were at least 10 of these, all in a row. “It slowly
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