Chris Filardi, director of Pacific Programs at the American Museum of Natural History, heard the distinctive "kokoko-kiew" call of the male bird, tracked it down - and then killed it, according to animal newsite The Dodo.
It is said that the formation holds the world's greatest known cache of fossilized bird tracks.
Israeli ornithologist Yossi Leshem says the incident is the third such arrest (so to speak) of a bird tracked by Israeli scientists in 3 decades.
The scientific article, "Bird Tracks from the Upper Cretaceous Cantwell Formation of Denali National Park, Alaska, USA: a new perspective on ancient northern polar vertebrate biodiversity," was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology, volume 9, Issue 1, March 2011, pages 33 49 (http://www.informaworld.com/).
Fiorello said that "The diversity of fossil bird tracks in the Cantwell formation of Denali is second to none anywhere in the world" and "contains riches beyond our expectations…Every year we go in there, every year we find new things, every year we come out and have to readjust the [theoretical] models…We haven't even begun to hit the point where the data are hitting a plateau".
In 1846, E. Tagert went so far as to assign them to an ichnogenus he named Iguanodon, and Samuel Beckles noted in 1854 that they looked like bird tracks, but might have come from dinosaurs.
Now, she said, the creek-formerly-known-as-Hazeltine has been transformed into a giant mud hole many times wider than the original stream one covered in bear, moose, deer, and bird tracks.
However, in modern bird tracks, digit impressions, including the hallux, have been known to precipitate mud cracks [48], [49], so it remains to be seen whether or not Anchisauripus truly does possess a hallux impression.
