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Extending from South Dakota to Wyoming, is known for its lush forests, picturesque waterfalls and complex and complex cave systems. But 150 million years ago, giant long neck dinosaurs called sauropods – and scientists have just identified one of their colossal fossil feet.
The almost complete foot fossil, consisting of 13 bones, was unearthed in 1998 from a multi-state rock body called the Morrison Formation. This region has produced a large amount of dinosaur fossils dating back to the late Jurassic, between 155 million and 148 million years ago. Scientists have unearthed diplodocus, allosaurus, stegosaurus … the list is long. The impressive amount of fossils out there, compared to the scientists available to examine them, is why it took two decades to identify this massive foot.
The foot appears to have belonged to a sort of brachiosaurus that extended 80 feet long, the researchers wrote in their newspaper published on Tuesday in PeerJ . To understand this, they used a 3D scanning technique to make computerized images of the foot bones, and compared them to other fossils of sauropods
"It's most likely a type of brachiosaurus , who became famous at Jurassic Park. (and then horribly murdered in Fallen Kingdom), "Femke Holwerda, a study writer and paleontologist at the Collection of Paleontology and Geology of the State of Bavaria, has told Gizmodo by e-mail. "The only problem is that the feet can rarely be diagnosed up to the level of the species, hence the brachiosaurus assignment and not to a specific species."
The same excavation site where this foot was dug up in northeastern Wyoming also contained an almost complete brachiosaurus, and a handful of other long-necked dinosaurs such as diplodocus and camarasaurs. The research team was surprised to see a brachiosaur as far north as it was thought that the animals occupied much smaller and more southerly pieces of land.
"This Brachiosaurus Appearing in Black Hills Wyoming Raises Questions" David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas who worked on paper. "Is it a different species of southern brachiosaurs? Or maybe they migrated from north to south? We are several hundred kilometers from where we thought these types were, so we We have a lot of new questions – it's great – I appreciate new questions and opportunities for further research. "
Yet the huge brachiosaur The foot is remarkable for more than its surprising location. At just under one meter wide, the researchers said that was the largest sauropod foot ever discovered Philip Mannion, a paleontologist from Imperial College London who was not involved in this discovery, agreed with this assessment
"The metatarsals seem to be longer than those of any other known sauropod dinosaur, so in this respect it is probably the largest foot ever discovered, "Mannion told Gizmodo. "Moreover, as Mannion and the authors of the study point out, we have never found the feet of the world's tallest sauropods, titanosaurus and argentinosaurus, which are species that do not are not much smaller. Surely surpass this brachiosaur in foot size. We have not yet seen the feet of these dinosaurs because foot fossils are notoriously elusive, according to author of the study Anthony Maltese, a paleontologist from the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado. Throughout history, they have been far more likely to be lost in the watercourse or eaten by scavengers because they are so small compared to the rest of the world. l & # 39; animal. The most recent discovery is particularly exciting.
"It's fantastic to finally have a brachiosaurus foot," Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Gowwell Elizabeth Fowler, a paleontologist at Dickinson State University who was born in New York, said. was not involved in this work. "Getting a decent complete foot for any dinosaur is a lucky find.While we continue to dig and find more bones, we're starting to get an idea of how big the growth is of each dinosaur species I think we will continue to break the record for the "greatest" again and again for many years to come. "
[PeerJ]
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