Paleontologists unearthed a massive fossil 20 years ago, but they never knew what dinosaur it belonged to until now.
The fossil, excavated in Wyoming, is the biggest dinosaur foot ever discovered. A study published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ finally identified the colossal bones, determining that the foot belonged to a brachiosaur, a type of sauropod dinosaur that lived in the late Jurassic Period.
"This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America," study co-author Emanuel Tschopp told Phys.org. The foot is nearly a meter wide, leading researchers to fondly nickname the specimen "Bigfoot." It was nearly complete, made up of 13 bones, when University of Kansas researchers found the fossil in the Black Hills in 1998. After extensive 3-D scanning and measuring, scientists were able to learn more about the 80-foot dinosaur that left its foot behind 150 million years ago. "It very likely is a type of brachiosaur, the kind that got famous in Jurassic Park (and then got horribly murdered in Fallen Kingdom)," Femke Holwerda, a co-author and paleontologist, told Gizmodo.
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But brachiosaurs primarily lived farther south, scientists thought, so finding "Bigfoot" all the way up in Wyoming raises some questions. Now, researchers are wondering whether the finding indicates that brachiosaurs were migratory, or whether the foot belonged to a different species of brachiosaur that lived in a different environment. While this specimen is the biggest foot ever unearthed, scientists say that there are plenty of larger dinosaurs that have yet to have their bones uncovered. "I think we are going to keep breaking the record for 'biggest' over and over for many years to come," said paleontologist Elizabeth Freedman Fowler. Read more at Gizmodo.
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