Dinosaur footprint found in Bolivia among largest ever discovered

One of the largest dinosaur footprints in the world has been discovered near the city of Sucre in central Bolivia.

Tour guide Grover Marquina came across the print earlier this month, some 80 million years after it was made, while researching a tourist route through the area, which is well known for fossil finds.

The footprint, which stretches four feet across, is among the largest ever discovered and the biggest of its kind to be found in South America. Tracks of a similar sizes have been uncovered in France and Argentina.

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"This is one of the major findings of this type of print," local palaeontologist Omar Medina told AFP. Based on its size, the dinosaur who left it behind "must have had a height of about 15 metres [49ft]", he added: "It was big."

Argentinian palaeontologist Sebastian Apesteguia, who is overseeing investigations of the site, believes the footstep came from an abelisaurus. The bipedal predator is thought to have stood around 30ft tall on average so the new finding suggests the species could have been "much larger", he told La Razon.

From the shape of the track, it appears the dinosaur was moving from north to south, in the direction of northern Argentina, where several abelisaurus skeletons have been discovered.

The Sucre area is home to Cal Orcko, a prehistoric treasure trove that is in the process of becoming a Unesco World Heritage site. Its limestone cliffs bear the traces of thousands of dinosaur footprints dating from the Cretaceous era, which ended 66 million years ago.