Nessie may be a mythical creature, but Scotland was once home to enormous dinosaurs that waded in shallow waters.
from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleague Tom Challands stumbled across several hundred footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago.
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The size of the prints 鈥� up to 70 centimetres across 鈥� suggests they were left by early sauropods. 鈥淭hey had a bigger footprint than T. rex,鈥� says Brusatte.
The largest creatures to ever have lived on land, these massive plant-eaters weighed around 20 tonnes, were up to 15聽metres long and several storeys high.
This is the largest discovery of dinosaur footprints in Scotland. And it helps to piece together how and where these behemoths lived.
鈥淭hese dinosaurs weren鈥檛 swimmers but they would have been moving around knee-deep in this brackish lagoon. Maybe the plants there were a good food source or maybe they got some protection from other dinosaurs there,鈥� says Brusatte.
Chance finding
Brusatte and Challands stumbled across the dinosaur tracks in April, at the end of a long day of scouting for fossil fish teeth and crocodile bones.
They were heading back to their car when they caught sight of an exposed platform of rock covered in big impressions, a bit like potholes. 鈥淭hen we noticed there was a zigzag shape to them,鈥� says Brusatte.
Very few fossil bones survive from the Middle Jurassic period and there are few sites of sauropod tracks worldwide.
鈥淭his is a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the reconstruction of sauropods鈥� way of life,鈥� says , a palaeontologist at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. 鈥淭he discovery opens a new window into the interpretation of how primitive sauropods walked and is one of the first steps in understanding how locomotion evolved in this kind of dinosaur.鈥�
Brusatte and Challands also discovered a single three-toed print at the site, which they believe is likely to have belonged to some sort of plant-eating iguanodon.
鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to understand what it was like when Scotland was much warmer, long before there were flowering plants鈥�, Brusatte says. 鈥淲hen it was a smaller island with incredible ecosystems and almost unimaginable animals.鈥�
Journal reference: Scottish Journal of Geology, DOI: 10.1144/sjg.2015-005
Read more: 鈥�Stunning fossils: Dinosaur death match鈥�
Image credits: top image: Jon Hoad; second image: Steve Brusatte
