One hundred million years ago, a small baby stegosaurus stomped on its hind legs in present-day China.
The footprint of this beautiful feline size of the Chalk period was discovered in Xinjiang, an area in northwestern China. The authors have a length of just 5.25 centimeters in length on March 3, this is the smallest stegosaurus imprint ever found. in the journal Palaios.
The site where the small hugs were found was also marked with large footprints of stegosaurs – a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that included the genus Stegosaurus – it was about 29 cm long at the back foot and about 5.7 centimeters long at the front foot. There was one small back footprint with the characteristic three-tone shape of stegosaurs. It is not clear to which species the footprint belonged, but remnants of a species are mentioned Wuerhosaurus homheni found in the area. This species is known only from fragmentary bones, but scientists know that it was the iconic backplates for which stegosaurs are known.
“Like the Stegosaurus, this little dinosaur probably had adult nails on its tail and bony plates along its back, “studied co-author Anthony Ramilio, a researcher in the Dinosaur Lab at the University of Queensland. said in a statement.
Possible small stegosaurus footprints have been found before, but whether it really belongs to stegosaur babies is controversial. Small tracks was found near Morrison, Colorado, in rocks from the Jurassic period (199 million to 145 million years ago), but not all paleontologists agree that these footprints are fossils. One of the co-authors of the new article, paleontologist Marin Lockley, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, argues that the prints are actually just pieces of mud irregularly shaped in sandstone.
Unlike the larger tracks at the Xinjiang site, the small track was not elongated. This was interesting for researchers because it suggests that the baby stegosaurus may not have moved like its adult counterparts.
“Stegosaurs usually walk with their heels on the ground, just like humans, but on four feet that create long footprints,” Romilio said. “The small orbit shows that this dinosaur pulled up from the ground with its heel, just as a bird or cat does today. We have only seen shortened tracks before when dinosaurs walked on two legs.”
It is possible that baby stegosaurs walked on their hind legs and switched to four feet as they got bigger, said co-author Lida Xing, a paleontologist at the Chinese University of Geosciences in Beijing.
” A complete set of footprints from these small footprints will give us the answer to this question, but unfortunately we have only one footprint, ” Xing said in a statement.
Originally published on Live Science.