Walking with dinosaurs

Sucre

Drying peppers

Named after the independence general rather than the tasty additive to chocolate, Sucre is still described in the LP as a "sweet treat". It is nice - good market, nice plaza, nice places to eat but, fundamentally, it is just another town even if it is where they signed the Bolivian declaration of independence.

The town

We spent day one exploring the town, which, as noted, is very pleasant. Nice leafy plaza opposite the cathedral, a market with lots of fruit (not to mention cheese, shoes, pasta, canned goods) and a bustling happy atmosphere. Sucre has lots of churches, although mostly they don't seem open and we have seen a lot already. But we were keen to have a look at the Capilla de la Virgen de Guadalupe which has a painting of said virgin encrusted with precious stones and apparently set off by Christmas lights. It sounded very Bolivian, but the chapel was impossible to find. We identified a possible door but it was very shut. So we tried later and eventually asked. It was closed for repairs.

The dinosaur wall

So we wandered up to the local hill and had a sandwich while looking out over the city. It is a beautiful view. Nancy decided that the best way to spend the afternoon was to go to a museum dedicated to preserving weaving as an art form, so she went off to do that. I stayed put and drank freshly squeezed fruit smoothies for the afternoon. I was saving my strength for Cretaceous Park the next morning.

However, fate intervened again. A friend tells me that we are currently going through the crap phase of a trip where you are too jaded to enjoy things and start getting sick. I hope we aren't too jaded, but our luck has certainly given up on us. The toe incident in Chile laid us up for three days, Nancy was horribly ill with altitude sickness at Laguna Colorada, and has had a cold ever since which now evolved into one of those travel bugs. So we put off the dino park for a day. She was still ill the next day, so, showing my true colours, I abandoned her and went by myself.

Titanosaurus prints

Cretaceous Park

This is another of those 'only in South America' stories.

68 million years ago, what is now the Sucre region was a low lake region. Many dinosaurs used to wander across the muddy land to drink at the lake. There was much rainfall and rapid sedimentation. The Andes rose, lifting the damp region and twisting it lake bed 90 degrees. The result is that what was once muddy ground is now a mudstone cliff. It was mined for concrete, until they met some unhelpful deposits, at a layer that is coincidentally full of preserved dinosaur footprints. What luck! But, since it is obvious from the site that there are foot prints in earlier layers, I wonder how many were destroyed. And the destruction continues. Although the wall is no longer worked, it has absolutely no protection and the footprints are disappearing. Hope is on the horizon though, as UNESCO is set to world heritage list the wall next year and then will apparently cover it in plastic to stop the erosion.

The wall is bizarre. It is vertical, and the footprints go straight up it, and sometimes across it. When you look at it, you feel as though giant flies have left footprints as they walked up the wall. You don't get within 100 m of the wall these days, being forced to look at it from the opposite side of the valley, but the prints are still clearly visible. I was told that the biggest is 88cm across,

So, who crossed this area? It seems that lots of dinosaurs did, but we were told of four species.

The fellows leaving the most common, impressive and sizable prints was titanosaurus. They reckon this beast grew to 36m long by 12 high on the basic plan of a brontosaurus, although the prints are thought to be by creatures no more than 20 to 25 m. They were here a lot and left big round elephant like prints behind.

Next were prints from an animal that I don't think they even knew about when I was reading dinosaur books: carnotaur (in Spanish, so presumably carnotaurus in English?), the southern hemisphere's answer to tyrannosaurus. Same basic shape as t-rex but with boney protuberances above the eyes and even more residuary front paws. Curiously, the information centre sizes this beast both at 8m and 12m long (and t-rex at 10m). Either way, an impressive beast. His tracks run across and up the cliff from right to left but have been badly eroded.

Next comes a favourite from the old dinosaur books: ankylosaurus, the 7 m long armoured tank of the dinosaur world.

Finally there were the crested herbivores called (I think) lambeosaurs.