The intense rains of September in various states of the country gave way to an ancient discovery which, for now, remains just that. A group of footprints of herbivorous, carnivorous and flying dinosaurs were discovered in several locations south of Puebla, as announced by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) through a bulletin published in the first days of December. Iván Alarcón Durán, biologist and head of the paleontology sector of the INAH Center in Puebla, told EL PAÍS that the Institute is abandoning research work on ichnites – footprints, traces or fossilized marks – due to lack of budget and security conditions. “Unfortunately, as the icnites were found on the slopes of ravines, which are difficult to access areas, the Institute cannot approve this type of sites due to the precariousness of the locality,” Alarcón Duarte said via video call.
The biologist explains that residents of the localities have been asked to make a brief recording with photographs taken from their cell phones, since the INAH will not do so. “If you stop, keep or preserve these traces, which will disappear naturally, you are spending resources in an area where you should not be spending them because you have other needs,” he says. “If we’re going to spend, I don’t know, 500,000 pesos on 300 meters so that in two years you won’t have any (the prints), it’s better that you use them on something else.”
The brands were located in Santa Ana Teloxtoc, in Tehuacán, and in Santa Catarina Tehuixtla and San Lucas Teteletitlán, in Atexcal, in the south of the state. The footprints date back about 120 million years. “They belong to the Lower Cretaceous. We know this thanks to previous studies in San Juan Raya (a town between Tehuacán and Atexcal, famous for its ecotourism park which is home to a large number of ichnites) in which we see that they have strata of the same temporality”, explains the biologist.
At each site, between five and twenty footprints were recorded over 200 to 800 meters, but the number of ichnites is not exact. “There was no counting,” explains Alarcón Durán. “We made a one-day inspection visit. Including the transfer from Puebla to the cities, we spent about five hours. We covered the greatest distance over which the prints appeared, but there are a number of them over a large part of the territory.” The biologist points out that it was possible to associate a biophase – accumulation of organic matter – of dark-colored oysters and that these strata are very close to where the prints begin to appear, very similar to the eight found in Atexcal, in 2003, among the oldest.
“These strata of footprints are on a vertical wall. Most of the evidence has been lost due to erosion, but others have emerged. What is needed is to do a new study to compile all of this and update the number, quantity and groups,” explains Alarcón Duarte. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the entire southern part of Puebla was under the ocean. As sediments erode and rainfall increases, the opportunity to explore and document records of the species that inhabited the region will remain latent. However, the lack of budget truncated the opportunity, among other things, to learn more about the environment and the dinosaurs that inhabited central Mexico.
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