Preserved Volcanic Mud Footprint, Holocene epoch (11,700 BCE-present), Nicaragua, 9 x 13 inches, Gift of Col. Joe A. McEachern, 1947.9.1.
This ghostly impression of a human foot, left in a cooled lava flow and preserved for millennia by a cushion of volcanic ash, may document one woman’s flight from an eruption at Nicaragua’s Momotombo volcano. Many fossilized footprints were discovered about fifteen feet below current ground level near the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in 1939.