GREENBELT, Md. (WJZ) The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) may be in the future business, but at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, it also has a footprint in the distant past.

Alex DeMetrick reports, the foot in question is a dinosaurs.

When NASA sent its latest rover to Mars, it carried a critical chemistry lab designed and built at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. But the newest discovery was in their own backyard.

And all of a sudden, I saw sticking out of the ground the edges of a footprint, dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford said.

People walked right by it not knowing its the footprint of a dinosaur.

You tend to ignore it, Stanford said. Most people have different search images. They dont have dinosaur tracks on their mind.

But Stanford does. An amateur paleontologist, he was visiting the NASA campus when he spotted it.

And there it was, to much of my joy and amazement, he said.

Easier to see the outline now? Its prehistoric mud pushed up and frozen in time, quite probably by something that looked like a Nodosaur, named for the armor-like nodes or nobs on its body.

This thing was very large and heavy, Stanford said. When it steps down into the mud, it oozes a squish-up, a squeeze-up around it and thats exactly what happened here.

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Amateur Paleontologist Finds Dinosaur Footprint Near Goddard Space Flight Center