Scientists have discovered dozens of giant dinosaur footprints in Scotland dating back 170 million years.
The tracks “were made in a muddy lagoon off the north-east coast of what is now the Isle of Skye”, reports the Evening Standard.
In a new study, published in the Scottish Journal of Geology, researchers reveal they have unearthed about 50 tracks, some as big as a car tyre.
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The discovery is considered to be “globally important”, says Sky News, as they are rare evidence of the Middle Jurassic period.
“Any time we find new dinosaurs it is exciting, especially in Scotland because the record is so limited and also because these are Middle Jurassic dinosaurs and there are very few dinosaur fossils of that age anywhere in the world,” said Dr Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist and co-author of the study from the University of Edinburgh.
Most of the prints were made by the ”older cousins” of Tyrannosaurus rex, called theropods, who stood at close to two metres tall, and by similarly sized long-necked sauropods.
Around “170 million years ago, shortly after the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up, the land that is now Skye was part of a smaller subtropical island, far closer to the equator, and replete with beaches, rivers and lagoons”, says The Guardian.
“This was a subtropical kind of paradise world, probably kind of like Florida or Spain today,” said Brusatte. “[These prints] were made in a shallow lagoon – dinosaurs walking in very shallow water.”
One of Brusatte’s students stumbled across the tracks in 2016 while on a field trip along Skye’s coast. “The tide went out and we noticed them,” said Brusatte. “We knew that you could find these things in Scotland and if you were walking on tidal platforms and you saw holes in the rock, they could, possibly, be footprints.”
Tidal conditions “made studying the footprints difficult, but researchers were able to identify two distinct trackways in addition to many individual footprints”, says Sky News.
Using drones to create a map of the site, the the team at the University of Edinburgh, Staffin Museum and Chinese Academy of Sciences, also created 3D pictures using a pair of cameras and customised software.
“These tracks were sort of hiding in plain sight for years,” University of Southern California paleontologist Michael Habib, who wasn't involved with the discovery told National Geographic.
“It goes to show how sauropods are so much larger than everything else, that we field palaeontologists are rarely looking for something of that scale at first.”
