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A 4-year-old girl walking on a beach with her family in Wales has discovered the region’s best-preserved dinosaur trail.
The trail comes from a beach known for the footprints of crocodilians, the extinct ancestors of the modern day crocodiles. The dinosaur which made the print was probably 30 inches (75 centimeters) high and 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long. Its 4 inch (10 cm) track resembles that of the dinosaur Coelophysis, although this particular species lived in North America, not in what is now Europe.
Lily Wilder, a preschooler on a walk with her father in Bendricks Bay, discovered the trail.
Related: Photos: dinosaur tracks reveal Australia’s ‘Jurassic Park’
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“It was Lily and Richard (her father) who discovered the print,” Lily’s mother, Sally Wilder, said in a statement. “Lily saw him as they were walking, and said ‘Daddy look.’ When Richard came home and showed me the photo, I thought it was amazing. Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who took it from there. “
The print was on loose rock and has now been removed from the National Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru in Welsh) with permission from Natural Resources Wales, the government-sponsored body that regulates conservation and environmental issues.
“This fossilized dinosaur footprint from 220 million years ago is one of the UK’s best-preserved examples and will really help paleontologists get a better idea of how these early dinosaurs walked,” Cindy Howells, the museum’s curator of paleontology, said in the statement.
The fossil is so detailed that the claws and the pads of the feet are visible. The print is a type known as a grallator, which means a bipedal theropod dinosaur with three toes created it. The dinosaur lived at the beginning of the Triassic period, when the area was a desert dotted with occasional saline lakes. Dinosaurs had only evolved about 10 million years before this mysterious three-toed creature walked this landscape, so its footprint is a tantalizing clue into the history of the first dinosaurs, according to the National Museum Wales .
“During the COVID pandemic, scientists from Amgueddfa Cymru stressed the importance of nature on people’s doorsteps, and this is a perfect example of that,” Howells said. “Obviously not all of us have dinosaur footprints on our doorstep, but there is a local nature treasure for you if you take the time to really take a close look.”
Originally posted on Live Science.
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