Thousands of fossilized dinosaur footprints have been discovered along the rocky banks of Alaska's Yukon River.
Footprints big and small were discovered in July by scientists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North during a 500-mile journey down the Tanana and Yukon rivers.
Scientists brought back 2,000 pounds of dinosaur footprint fossils, according to the Huffington Post.
"We found dinosaur footprints by the scores on literally every outcrop we stopped at," expedition researcher Paul McCarthy, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a press statement. "I've seen dinosaur footprints in Alaska now in rocks from southwest Alaska, the North Slope and Denali National Park in the Interior, but there aren't many places where footprints occur in such abundance."
In the last 10 years, dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Alaska's Denali National Park, left in rocks that formed 65 million to 85 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period, according to the Huffington Post.
Pat Druckenmiller, the museum's earth sciences curator, said that a find this big is rare today.
"It took several years of dedicated looking before the first footprint was discovered in Denali in 2005, but since that time hundreds of tracks of dinosaurs and birds have been found," McCarthy explained in a statement. "In contrast, the tracks were so abundant along the Yukon River that we could find and collect as many as 50 specimens in as little as 10 minutes."
The tracks were preserved in "natural casts" formed after dinosaurs stepped in mud and sand filled in their footprints.
Researchers say they have a lot more work to do before they can truly understand their findings. They're also working with nearby villages to figure out new expeditions in the region, according to the Huffington Post.
"This is the kind of discovery you would have expected in the Lower 48 a hundred years ago," Druckenmiller said in a statement. "We found a great diversity of dinosaur types, evidence of an extinct ecosystem we never knew existed."
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