Footprints of an early dinosaur, dating back more than 200 million years, have been unearthed on a beach in Wales. Palaeontologists at London’s Natural History Museum said the footprints, which date from the Triassic period, appear to belong to an early sauropod or a related.
Dr Susannah Maidment, palaeontologist at the museum, said in a statement, ‘We know early sauropods were living in Britain at the time, as bones of Camelotia, a very early sauropod, have been found in Somerset in rocks dated to the same period. We don’t know if this species was the track-maker, but it is another clue which suggests something like it could have made these tracks’.
Maidment and her colleague, Professor Paul Barrett, received photographs of the tracks near the beach in Penarth from an amateur palaeontologist in 2020. They also paid a visit to the location to investigate the tracks and take measurements.
Also Read: What lies beneath… Antarctic ice shelves hide numerous species of fishes
In the announcement of the museum about the findings, Barrett said, ‘We believed the impressions we saw at Penarth were consistently spaced to suggest an animal walking. We also saw displacement rims where mud had been pushed up. These structures are characteristic of active movement through the soft ground’.
Post Your Comments