In the first exploration in the course of 2017-2018, I studied Dinosaur Investigation. First of all, we knew that there a footprint site in Battambang province from the Department of Geology in Ministry of Mine and Energy, Cambodia. This is the new topic for me and for my team. As it is a new topic for us, it quite difficult for us to do field methodology including casting and identifying the footprints. Our team spent a day walking around the area to do field method for possible footprints such as taking notes, measuring the length and the size of the footprints, identifying rock type and recording geographic coordinates and elevation. We then used clay and plaster of Paris to make casts of the footprints for more investigation in class. Besides doing the casts, we interviewed some people around the area whether they believe in dinosaurs and it turned out that they didn’t believe that dinosaurs existed. We had recorded about 15 difference footprints on the site by dividing the whole big site into four smaller sites call A, B, C, and D.
After this inconvenient day, we finally cast from the prints that we think it is dinosaur’s footprints. After having all the casting, our next immense goal is to validate our footprints by writing our own report. Therefore, we created a report that contains all of the information such as, the site and the landmark and the footprint itself, in order for us to send this report to other experts. So, we then worked with five paleontologists around the globe to validate and help us on the footprints that we have discovered.
Through working with other paleontologists from around the world we managed to validate our footprints and it turned out that some of our footprints are actually the real dinosaur footprints. So now we need to work on preservation and distribute all the information to Cambodia and all around the world.