Qualla: Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diagoh, CC BY-SA 4.0. The river has to leave before the dinosaurs arrive. For part of every year the Rio do Peixe runs over the site and hides it; when the sertão dries and the water drops, a rock pavement emerges in the bed and the tracks come back — deep three-toed punctures, broad rounded pads, whole lines of them walking off toward the bank and stopping where the stone ends. This is Passagem das Pedras, an island in the riverbed about seven kilometres from the centre of Sousa, and it is the most visited fragment of a fossil landscape that spreads across roughly 700 square kilometres of western Paraíba.

Image: Diagoh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: How a Footprint Outlives Everything Else

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Allan Patrick from Natal, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Nothing about this should have worked. A footprint is a hole in soft ground, and soft ground does not last. What made the Rio do Peixe basin exceptional was the rhythm of its Early Cretaceous climate, which happened to be almost exactly the rhythm the sertão keeps today. Animals ...

Image: Allan Patrick from Natal, Brasil | CC BY-SA 2.0

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: Eighty Species, Thirty Sites

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The valley takes in the city of Sousa and ten other municipalities, and tracks turn up at about thirty separate localities within it. Palaeontologists have logged over fifty distinct types of trace and footprints attributed to more than eighty species, among them stegosaurids, al...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: The Farmer and the Engineer

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Junior1119, CC BY-SA 3.0. A local farmer, Anísio Fausto Silva, noticed the marks in the late nineteenth century. He was not looking for fossils; nobody in Brazil was, and when the first dinosaur footprints in the country were recognised here in 1897, there was no Brazilian palaeontology to receive them. T...

Image: Junior1119 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: Walkways Over the Riverbed

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruno Marques SS PB, CC BY-SA 3.0. Visiting the site means walking above it. A R$1.3 million renovation funded by the federal government and Petrobras reopened the attraction on 24 May 2013, having rebuilt the museum, the exhibition space, the auditorium and the paths, and brought the lookout gazebos up to accessi...

Image: Bruno Marques SS PB | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valley of the Dinosaurs, Paraíba: Neglect and Its Remedies

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rocmayer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Protection on paper and protection in practice are different things. In December 2015 reporters found the valley in visible decline: renovation work suspended after funding to the contractor stalled, access roads swallowed by scrub, heaps of sand and loose cobblestones around the...

Image: Rocmayer | CC BY-SA 4.0