A 4-year-old girl walking on a beach with her family in Wales has discovered the best-preserved dinosaur track in the area.
The track is from a beach known for footprints of crocodiles, extinct ancestors of modern times crocodile. The dinosaur this made the pressure probably 75 centimeters long and 2.5 meters long. The orbit of 10 cm (4 inches) looks similar to that of the dinosaur Coelophysis, although that particular species lived in North America, not what is currently Europe.
Lily Wilder, a toddler who visits Bendricks Bay with her father, 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 when they walked together and said, ‘Daddy, look. ‘When Richard came home and showed me the picture, I thought it looked amazing. Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who took it from there. ‘
The imprint was on a loose stone and has now been removed to the National Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru in Wales) with permission from Natural Resources Wales, the government-backed body that regulates conservation and environmental issues.
“This petrified dinosaur footprint of 220 million years ago is one of the best-preserved examples from anywhere in the UK and will help paleontologists get a better idea of how these early dinosaurs walked,” said Cindy Howells, paleontology curator. at the museum, said. , said in the statement.
The fossil is so detailed that the claws and pads of the feet are visible. The print is a species known as a grallator, which means that a two-legged theropod dinosaur with three toes created it. The dinosaur at the beginning of the Triassic period, when the region was a desert with sometimes salt lakes. Dinosaurs evolved only about 10 million years before this mysterious three-tone creature walked this landscape, so its printing is a teasing clue in early dinosaur history, according to the National Museum Wales.
“During the COVID pandemic, scientists from Amgueddfa Cymru stressed the importance of nature before people’s threshold, and this is a perfect example of this,” Howells said. “Obviously we do not all have dinosaur footprints in front of our door, but there is a wealth of nature in your area if you take the time to look really close enough.”
Originally published on Live Science.