Uhangri Tracksite and Haenam Dinosaur Museum Guide

Introduction

Uhangri is the only locality on record where dinosaur tracks, pterosaur tracks and web-footed bird tracks occur on the same bedding plane. The tracks stay in the rock on the shore of Hwangsan-myeon in Haenam County, and the Haenam Uhangri Dinosaur Museum stands beside them.

South Korea protects the ground as Natural Monument 394, under the name Haenam Uhangri Dinosaur, Pterosaur and Bird Track Fossil Site. The designation covers 1,228,439.2 square meters and Haenam County manages it.

The site exists because of engineering. The Korea Heritage Service records that this coast was under water until a dyke built to link the Hwawon Peninsula with Mokpo lowered the water level and exposed the beds.

Pterosaur tracks from Uhangri were the first reported anywhere in Asia. Huh, Lim and Yang published the discovery in 1996 in the Journal of the Geological Society of Korea.

Location and Directions

The designated tracksite covers Uhang-ri 191 and the land around it, in Hwangsan-myeon, Haenam County, South Jeolla Province. The Korea Heritage Service gives the position as 34.5897°N, 126.4375°E.

The museum address is 234 Gongnyongbangmulgwan-gil, Hwangsan-myeon, Haenam County, South Jeolla 59007. The telephone number is 061-530-5949.

Opening hours run 09:00 to 18:00. Last entry is one hour before closing. The museum closes every Monday.

Admission for an individual costs 5,000 won for an adult aged 19 to 64, 4,000 won for a young person aged 13 to 18, and 3,000 won for a child aged 5 to 12. Groups pay 4,000, 3,000 and 2,000 won on the same bands. Entry is free for visitors aged 4 and under and 65 and over, for Haenam residents, and for registered disability cardholders, among other categories set out in the county ordinance.

The museum refunds half the admission as a Haenam Love gift voucher, calculated on the total paid in one transaction. Refunds under 1,000 won are not issued.

A 4D cinema inside the museum charges 3,000 won separately. Shows run at 10:00, 11:00, 13:00, 14:00, 15:00 and 16:00, and each lasts 15 minutes. The free-entry categories do not apply to it.

Haenam sits at the southwestern tip of the Korean peninsula. Mokpo is the nearest city of any size, and the drive in is by road from Haenam town or across the Hwawon Peninsula.

What Fossils You'll Find

Nothing to collect and nothing to hammer. Every track here stays where it formed, under a roof, and the point of the visit is to read the surfaces.

Pterosaur tracks. Hwang and colleagues named Haenamichnus uhangriensis in Geological Magazine in 2002. The prints run five to six times larger than those of Pteraichnus, which makes them the largest pterosaur trace fossils known. The pes prints show no impressions of individual digits and no claw marks, and the absence of a fifth toe impression points to pterodactyloids. The authors attributed the tracks to azhdarchids.

The trackway at site P9 runs 7.3 metres and holds 14 pairs of foot impressions. That is the longest pterosaur trackway recorded from any site, and it is the main evidence that azhdarchids walked competently on the ground. Kim and colleagues put the wingspan of the trackmaker at 10 metres or more.

The Gwacheon National Science Museum puts the total at 443 pterosaur footprints at the site.

Bird tracks. Yang and colleagues named two ichnospecies from Uhangri in the journal Ichnos in 1995, both from tracks of birds with webbed feet. Uhangrichnus chuni rests on a large sample of small tracks in a high-density assemblage. Hwangsanipes choughi rests on a single trackway of a larger bird from the same level. The paper called them the oldest traces of web-footed birds then reported.

Dinosaur tracks. Lee and Huh excavated 105 sauropod tracks from black shale here and published them in the Journal of Paleontology in 2002. They argued the prints are true manus prints rather than undertracks, and that swimming sauropods made them. That reading is contested, and later work has questioned whether the star-shaped trackway is a swimming sauropod at all or undertracks from an ornithopod.

The Korea Heritage Service record also lists dinosaur bone fossils from the site, alongside the three kinds of footprint.

Geologic History

The Uhangri Formation is the middle unit of the Haenam Group in the Haenam Basin. An andesitic tuff with andesite intrusions and flows lies below it, and the Hwangsan Tuff lies above. The formation runs about 400 metres thick and consists mainly of sandstone with some shale.

The track beds formed on a lake margin. Yang and colleagues describe the bird track horizon as lacustrine shoreface sediment.

On the age, this page uses 96 to 81 million years, and here is why. Kim and colleagues dated the volcanic rocks around the track beds by the rubidium-strontium and potassium-argon methods, and published the result in Island Arc in 2003. Rubidium-strontium whole-rock ages came out at 96.0 plus or minus 2.5 million years for the lapilli andesitic tuff, 81.0 plus or minus 2.0 million years for the felsic tuff, and 77.9 plus or minus 4.1 million years for the Hwangsan welded tuff. Potassium-argon ages ran younger, from 83.2 to 68.8 million years.

The black shale that carries the pterosaur and web-footed bird tracks sits between the lapilli andesitic tuff and the felsic tuff. That brackets the track layer at 96 to 81 million years, which spans the Cenomanian to the Campanian. The dinosaur footprints fall in a slightly wider bracket of 96 to 78 million years.

Other figures circulate. The Korea Heritage Service record estimates the beds at about 85 to 83 million years. Compiled reference pages quote a Campanian age of 81 to 79 million years. None of the sources read for this page supports a Maastrichtian age. The bracket from Kim and colleagues wins out here because it is the only figure measured on rocks directly above and below the track-bearing shale.

Why the three groups overlap matters as much as the date. Pterosaurs, web-footed birds and dinosaurs all walked one lake shore, which Hwang and colleagues read as a shared habitat with different ecological niches.

Collecting Rules and Regulations

Collect nothing. The whole area is Natural Monument 394 under Korean heritage law, and the tracks are protected where they lie.

Do not hammer, chalk, trace, cast or wet any track surface. Do not climb on a bedding plane inside a shelter.

Keep to the walkways and viewing platforms. The track surfaces are soft shale and sandstone, and foot traffic wears a print away.

The museum ordinance bars entry to anyone intoxicated, anyone carrying flammable or explosive material, anyone with a contagious disease, pre-school children without an adult, and anyone with an animal. It also bars anyone likely to damage the heritage or the facilities.

Report anything you find loose on the shore to the museum staff. Leave it where it is.

Safety

The tracksite sits on a reclaimed coastal flat behind a dyke. Stay inside the fenced and roofed areas. The ground outside them is uneven rock and mud.

Shale surfaces turn slippery after rain. Walkways and steps inside the shelters get wet in sea air.

Korean summers are hot and humid, and typhoons reach the southwest coast between roughly July and September. Check the forecast before you travel.

Shade outside the shelters is limited. Carry water and sun protection.

Watch children near the open track surfaces and the platform edges.

The museum closes on Mondays, so a Monday arrival leaves you with no access, no shelter and no facilities.

Sources

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0016756802006647 https://doi.org/10.1080/10420949509380111 https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1738.2003.00385.x https://doi.org/10.14770/jgsk.1996.32.7.526 https://doi.org/10.1666/0022-3360(2002)076<0558:MOSTIT>2.0.CO;2 https://uhangridinopia.haenam.go.kr/bbs/page.php?hid=viewing_time https://www.khs.go.kr/cha/SearchKindOpenapiDt.do?ccbaKdcd=16&ccbaAsno=0003940000000&ccbaCtcd=36 https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/mgF5I4YST-Wx8g https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haenamichnuswittonnaish2008.png https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002271