Unveiling the Giant’s Path: North Dakota Yields First-Ever Full-Grown T. Rex Footprints
The consecutive footprints of a single adult T. rex, however, had never been discovered — until now.
“Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior,” Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver museum, said in a statement. “With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T rex.”
Denver Museum of Nature & ScienceThe trackway spans 23 feet, and consists of four footprints, each one about three feet long.
In their paper, Lyson and his team suggest that, after the animal left, its prints filled with sandy water that contained bacteria. That water, with a high concentration of organic matter, likely enabled sediments and minerals to crystallize in layers, until a concoction of calcium carbonate and sandstone solidified into the fossil we have now.
Now, three of the footprints are about to be recovered by helicopter and taken to the Denver museum.
“It’s a really hard thing to excavate because it’s rock-on-rock, not rock-on-bone,” Lyson told National Geographic.
The team hopes to share updates about the conservation of the footprints in the winter, opening a window for the public into the details of this exciting discovery.
“As a teacher, I’m always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation,” Hups said in the statement. “I never imagined that could lead me to a discovery like this.”
After reading about the first-known adult T. rex footprints ever found, learn about the Nagatitan, an 88-foot behemoth that’s the largest dinosaur ever discovered in Southeast Asia. Then, learn about the new dinosaur species named “star lizard” in honor of David Bowie.
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