A 4-year-old girl walking on the beach with her family in Wales has discovered the best preserved dinosaur trail in the area.
The track is from a beach known for its crocodilian footprints, extinct ancestors of the modern era crocodiles. The dinosaur who made the print was probably 30 inches (75 centimeters) long and 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long. The 4 inch (10 cm) orbit resembles that of the dinosaur Coelophysisalthough that particular species lived in North America, not what is now Europe.
Lily Wilder, a toddler who was hiking with her father in Bendricks Bay, discovered the track.
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“It was Lily and Richard (her father) who discovered the footprint,” Lily’s mother Sally Wilder said in a statement. Lily saw it as they walked by and said “Daddy look. “When Richard came home and showed me the photo, I thought it looked fantastic. Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who took it from there.”
The print was located on loose rock and has now been transferred to 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 best-preserved examples from anywhere in the UK and will really help paleontologists get a better idea of how these early dinosaurs ran,” said Cindy Howells, curator palaeontology of the museum. , said in the statement.
The fossil is so detailed that the claws and soles of the feet are visible. The print is a type known as a grallator, which means that a three-toed bipedal theropod dinosaur created it. The dinosaur lived at the beginning of the Triassic period, when the region was a desert dotted with occasional salty lakes. Dinosaurs had only evolved about 10 million years before this mysterious three-toed creature walked this landscape, so the print is a tantalizing clue to the early history of dinosaurs, according to the National Museum Wales.
“During the COVID pandemic, scientists at Amgueddfa Cymru have emphasized the importance of nature on the doorstep of humans, and this is a perfect example of this,” said Howells. “Obviously, we don’t all have dinosaur footprints on our doorstep, but there is a wealth of local wildlife for you if you take the time to really get close enough.”
Originally published on Live Science.