Quick Fact

Every acre of the Western United States has an exiting geological story.
However, that doesn't justify creating a national monument.
The American public has certain expectations of what a monument should entail.

 This proposed monument fails that most basic expectation of a national monument.

What the Bill Says
Section 3 (2) states:

the trackways contain footprints of numerous amphibians, reptiles, and insects (including previously unknown species), plants, and petrified wood dating back approximately 280,000,000 years, which collectively provide new opportunities to understand animal behaviors and environments from a time predating the dinosaurs;

 We already have a good idea of what the Earth was like back then and we learned it without designating a national monument each time we found a piece of evidence.

Is this the only place on the planet that these tracks have been found?

Absolutely not. These same tracks are found world wide. How is this possible you ask? At the time that the tracks were created 280 million years ago, the Earth had one super continent called Gondwana.

Some great geological maps have been posted by Dr. Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology at Northern Arizona University (NAU). He has one page that shows the Paleogeography and Geologic Evolution of North America at 5 to 10 million year intervals. Another great page concentrates on the Paleogeography of the Southwestern US during the middle and late Permian (the time period the tracks were made here). The following pictures are located on his web site:

North America 275 Million years ago Middle Permian	Southwestern US 270 Million years ago	North America 260 Million years ago Late Permian	Southwestern US 250 Million years ago

As you can see by the maps, this area was near the Equator when the Abo red beds were forming.

The Abo formation was first named and described in Abo Canyon, about 12 miles outside Socorro, NM. and extends over 300 miles from the U.S. Mexican border to north of Las Vegas, NM.

A paper by Dr. Adrian Hunt describes the Abo Formation as such:

The Abo Formation is a red bed unit of Lower Permian age that is widely exposed in central New Mexico, particularly in Socorro County. In Socorro County, the Abo contains some Plant fossils (Hunt, 1983) and vertebrate body fossils (Berman, 1993), but the most abundant fossi1s are tetrapod footprints.[1]

The paper further describes that prior to 1990, in Socorro County, NM, only a few tracks had been found, but it also states that since 1990 things have changed:

From 1990 onward, WC and JC have collected nearly 200 specimens of tracks and plant fossils from this area for the NMMNH.[2]

DID YOU GET THAT? More specimens have come out of Abo Canyon since 1990 than have come out of the proposed national monument!

Bottom line - these track are not unique to the Robledo Mountains