Kent Hups, a science instructor at Northglenn High School, talks about how to identify dinosaurs by how many toes they had in Broomfield, Colorado, on Friday, May 31, 2024. BROOMFIELD — Past fields of yellow wildflowers, tall grass and prairie dog burrows, an Adams County geology teacher, four of his students and the Broomfield mayor huddled around the fossilized footprint of a horned dinosaur that roamed this land some 70 million years ago.
“I’m excited as hell,” Hups said. “You do a lot of whooping and hollering by yourself when you find these things. When you find footprints, you’re looking at something that was left by a living animal. To be able to touch that — it’s like 70 million years ago, this thing was alive and stepped right here. I’m stepping in the same place. It’s an amazing feeling.”
Alanna Santa Cruz, 15, looks for dinosaur fossils in Broomfield, Colorado, on Friday, May 31, 2024. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” she said. “I knew all about them and had a bunch of the toys and watched all the movies. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a paleontologist.”
“If you’re not sure, lick it,” Hups said, bringing an object from the ground to his lips and grazing it with his tongue. “If it sticks to it like ice, that’s a fossil.” The class wrote down the GPS coordinates of their finds so they can bring them back later in the year after they’re done investigating them, so as not to disturb the natural resources, Hups said.
Millions of years ago, these massive creatures walked where the class stood, Hups said, pointing toward cars speeding down U.S. 287 in the distance.
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