Dinosaur footprints, fossils discovered in Broomfield

BROOMFIELD – Past fields of yellow wildflowers, tall grass and prairie dog dens, an Adams County geology teacher, four of his students and the mayor of Broomfield huddled around the fossilized footprint of a horned dinosaur that roamed this land some 70 million years ago .

“To have this in our own backyard,” said Mayor Guyleen Castriotta. “You can’t beat it.”

Friday afternoon’s field trip was the result of Northglenn High School geology teacher Kent Hups stumbling upon dinosaur fossils while exploring about three years ago.

Go a researcher at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who has been unearthing fossils throughout the West for decades. During the height of the pandemic, he stayed closer to home and took his high school geology students on virtual walks through his community, looking for natural treasures to share with them via Zoom.

That’s when he first found dinosaur fossils on Broomfield’s open space, bordering a suburb. To help preserve the area, Hups does not want to reveal the exact location.

“I’m extremely excited,” Hups said. “When you find these things, you do a lot of whooping and hollering on your own. If you find footprints, you are looking at something left by a living animal. To be able to touch that – it’s like this thing lived 70 million years ago and stepped right here. I step in the same place. It’s a great feeling.”

Walking through thick grass and winding up and down steep hills, Hups led the class to three dinosaur footprints, but said there were definitely more in the area. The fossilized footprints resembled garden stepping stones sticking out of the grass, slightly larger than a basketball with ridges and indentations that Hups said were the dinosaurs’ toes.

Based on the toe patterns, Hups said it was a horned dinosaur – possibly a Triceratops.

It took a while to work with the city of Broomfield on the proper permits, but on Friday Hups was finally able to bring some students along to survey the area. He handed out plastic bags to the teens — some of whom had set out in Doc Marten boots and Converse sneakers — and showed them how to crouch low to inspect the dirt for bones.

Alanna Santa Cruz, 15, pulled a magnifying glass from her back pocket as she crouched on the ground, her knees touching the earth through the torn holes in her jeans.

Alanna is in Hups’ paleontology club.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” she said. “I knew everything about it, had a lot of toys and watched all the movies. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a paleontologist.”

The area they visited Friday was littered with small fossils and bones sticking out of the ground among the rocks, cacti and soil. Some were more clearly visible to the untrained eye – for example in the shape of vertebrae – while others could be confused with rocks and debris. The pieces of creatures were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and were scattered everywhere, broken into pieces after years of exposure.

Students approached Hups with cupped palms full of objects. Sometimes Hups told them they had just found a mineral, but other times his eyes lit up when he announced they had found bone.

“If you’re not sure, lick it,” Hups said, raising an object from the ground to his lips and running his tongue over it. “If it sticks to it like ice, it’s a fossil.”

Hups’ students looked at their teacher with disgusted grimaces.

“Try it!” he said happily.

“No, thank you, sir,” Alanna said.

When Hups turned her back, Alanna marveled at an object in her hand, turning it over and over in an attempt to determine its value. She brought it to her mouth and licked it quickly.

“You gotta do what you gotta do,” she said, labeling it a fossil and putting it in her bag.

The class recorded the GPS coordinates of their finds so they can bring them back later in the year after they finished the research, so as not to disturb the natural resources, Hups said.

Jonah Rotert, 17, was quiet and reserved at the start of the hike, but he couldn’t help but grin as his bag was filled with tiny bones of prehistoric creatures. Hups said he was confident Rotert had found a crocodile bone.

“It’s a really cool feeling,” Rotert said. “I’m the first person in millions of years to touch it.”

Millions of years ago, these enormous creatures walked where the classroom stood, Hups said, pointing to cars driving along U.S. 287 in the distance.