In the much-loved city of Las Cruces, outdoor activities are paramount and plentiful. Of the many exciting adventures to be found in this stark and stunning landscape is discovering the marks left behind by some ancient creepy-crawlies.

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In 1987, a major deposit of Paleozoic Era footprints were discovered in mega-trackways throughout the Robledo mountains. These fossils, known as ichnofossils, belonged to an excitingly large number of creatures from land and sea, as well as the prehistoric insect world. Along with the fossilized fauna was flora as well, consisting of fossilized plants and petrified wood dating back 280 million years.

The trackways have been studied by by scientists, museums and research facilities all over the world, understandably attracting a lot of professional attention and inspiring scientific articles and journals aplenty. The beauty of the trackways is that being a paleontologist is not a prerequisite to take a walk through a long-gone ancient world.

The monument itself is the 100th active National Monument and is located at the northern tip of the Chihuahuan Desert, along the western portion of the Rio Grande lift. While the trackways themselves lie over a colossal area of 5,255 acres and can be hard for the untrained eye to spot, the monument itself is full of marine invertebrate fossils to check out, and many slabs of the more impressive dinosaur tracks can be viewed at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.