Biology and chemistry students who enter the halls of the future Sciences Laboratory Building could find themselves walking among the footprints of prehistoric giants.
A Utah man last week gave the Division of Biological Sciences four castings of tracks left by dinosaurs about 65 million years ago in peat swamps that later turned to coal.
The three-toed casts - two from footprints of Hadrosaurs (duckbilled dinosaurs), one from a Tyrannosaurus rex, and one from a raptor - may become a centerpiece of an educational exhibit about the fauna and flora of the late Cretaceous period.
Tom Rost, associate dean for the Division of Biological Sciences, hopes the dinosaur tracks and other exhibits featuring an old electron microscope, underwater camera and other scientific equipment will help make the Sciences Laboratory Building a place where people will want to come - whether they study science or not.
"We want people to feel a sense of ownership of the building," Rost said. "We have an obligation to make it as special a place as we can so people want to identify with it.
"Having these amazing dinosaur footprints, other artifacts and old scientific equipment will give us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a unique biology teaching environment. Seeing actual dinosaur footprints will be a great experience for our students and visitors as well. I can see the new building as a destination for K-6 children in the area."
Robert Rowley Jr., who donated the castings, has collected close to 100 of the footprints from the ceiling of a coal mine near Price, Utah, where he worked. For more than 25 years, Rowley has made fiberglass-polyester resin castings of the tracks, donating many of them to museums across the nation.
Rowley said he learned from his cousin, Marye Wanlass, that the Division of Biological Sciences was looking for dinosaur artifacts. Wanlass worked as a temporary employee in the division's dean's office in August and September. Wanlass said she read in a Dateline article posted on a bulletin board outside the office that Rost was seeking dinosaur bones, old scientific equipment and science-related art to display in the Sciences Laboratory Building when it opens in 2004. "I had just been admiring my own collection (of dinosaur tracks) from Robert at home," said Wanlass, who now works for the campus Public Communications Office.
Rowley began tracking dinosaur footprints when he was 18. His coal-miner father took him into the Spring Canyon No. 5 Coal Mine and showed him a trail of about a dozen prints on the mine ceiling, with tail marks running down the middle. "Talk about exciting!" said Rowley.
He later went to work for the coal company himself, in large part to get close to the tracks, which he says are some of the best specimens around. "You don't find footprints that show the claws, the details that the (prints in) coal mines do."
Rowley believes his collection is the largest of its kind in the world, and the only one with raptor footprints.
The dinosaurs left their footprints in ancient peat and, in times of flooding, the prints sometimes filled with sand. Over the ages, as the dinosaurs disappeared and mountains formed on top of the swamps, the sand turned to stone and the peat to coal. When miners dug out the coal, they discovered the footprints on the roof.
When Rowley brought the castings to the Division of Biological Sciences last week, Rowley met another avid dinosaur enthusiast in Glen Lusebrink, who coordinates the division's Sciences Teaching Internship Program. Lusebrink, a former public school teacher with a UC Davis geology degree, began envisioning an exhibit that would become a field-trip destination for schoolchildren.
Rost, who chairs the planning committee for the Sciences Laboratory, and Lusebrink are discussing ways to best display the footprints, including possibly putting new casts into hallway floors and outdoor concrete walkways.
The largest of the castings given to the division, from the track of a duckbilled dinosaur, measures 35 inches long and 22 inches wide. The raptor track, which Rowley said has been identified as a Deinonychus, is the smallest at 19 inches long and 12 inches wide.
Construction of the Sciences Laboratory Building is scheduled to begin this spring on Hutchison Drive between the Life Sciences Addition and Haring Hall. Workers are scheduled to begin clearing the site next week.
The $58 million building, funded primarily with voter-approved state bond financing, will include 34 state-of-the-art laboratory classrooms, student discussion rooms, learning centers, offices, two computer laboratories and an adjacent 500-seat lecture hall-all for undergraduate instruction in biology and introductory chemistry.
Rost is still looking for dinosaur bones and other artifacts to display in the new building.
A third-floor study lounge will feature a vaulted ceiling and a balcony looking down to the second floor-a perfect place, he said, for a dinosaur skeleton.