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(36,247 posts) Wed May 2, 2018, 02:52 PM May 2018

Huge Dinosaur Footprints Discovered on Scottish Coast (NatGeo)

The tracks shed light on dinosaur life in the Middle Jurassic, a period from which few fossils have survived.

By Michael Greshko
PUBLISHED April 2, 2018

More than 160 million years ago, long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods lumbered through the ancient lagoons that dotted what is now Great Britain. Now, dozens of their footprints have been found on the forbidding, wave-pounded coast of Scotland's Isle of Skye.

Standing on Skye's rocky shores, you might mistake the huge footprints for tidal pools—except that on second glance, you'd see that the pools trace the toes and fleshy heels of dinosaurs.

“These tracks were sort of hiding in plain sight for years,” says University of Southern California paleontologist Michael Habib, who wasn't involved with the discovery. “It goes to show how sauropods are so much larger than everything else, that we field paleontologists are rarely looking for something of that scale at first.”

Amid the large prints, the team also found distinctive three-toed footprints made by theropods, likely creatures that were older cousins of the Cretaceous-period Tyrannosaurus rex.

The full suite of footprints, unveiled in the Scottish Journal of Geology on April 2, provides a rare glimpse into the Middle Jurassic, a period spanning 164 to 174 million years ago that so far has yielded few dinosaur fossils of any kind. The latest discovery helps cement the Isle of Skye as a key region for bringing this little understood era to life.