[ Las Cruces Page ]          It's been a great 151 years of
history, at least the recorded type.  But long before the Army
surveyed and platted Las Cruces indeed long before Spanish
explorer Don Juan de Onate made the area a stopover on his trip
from Mexico City to search for gold, the area was inhabited.
First came perhaps the most interesting inhabitants, the giant
reptiles and amphibians who occupied the area during the Permian
Period.  Those animals, which pre-date dinosaurs, lived in the
now desert Southwest when it was home to a giant inland lake. As
the lake dried, their footprints and bones were caught in
fossilized rocks.  In the late 1980s, a local amateur
paleontologist discovered the fossils. The area where they were
found is, by his reckoning, one of the most productive fossils
finds ever discovered. The Smithsonian Institute agrees, calling
the find the world's best-fossilized footprints from that era,
one that existed about 600 million years ago.  The remains of
herbivores and carnivores have b