2024-08-17 17:01:56
A mother and her 10-year-old daughter accidentally discovered dinosaur footprints on a beach in Wales while searching for fossils. The Natural History Museum is conducting standard checks, but the director claims to be “almost certain” that they are the footprints of a herbivore that lived 200 million years ago.
The young Tegan and her mother Claire were walking along a beach in South Wales during the summer holidays when they stumbled upon dinosaur footprints that are over 200 million years old, reported British broadcaster BBC on Saturday, August 17.
The 10-year-old girl and her mother had traveled to the coastline located between the cities of Cardiff and Barry specifically to search for fossils in this Glamorgan valley, known to be a hotspot for prehistoric discoveries.
“We really didn’t expect to find anything,” says Claire, the amazed mother, who asserts that she immediately took photos of the large holes they had found to email to the national museum of Wales.
A constant distance between each footprint
Cindy Howells, the paleontology curator at the National Museum of Wales, is “almost certain that these are indeed real dinosaur footprints.” At the BBC, she states that she is “convinced of their authenticity” due to “the regularity of their stride,” although checks are currently underway to confirm this.
“We have five footprint impressions with about 1.5 meters of distance between each of them. It would be questionable if they were random holes, but in this case, we have a left foot, a right foot, then another left and another right… there is a constant distance between them,” explains the specialist.
According to paleontologists, these enormous footprints spaced apart could belong to a type of four-legged dinosaur called sauropodomorpha that lived during the Triassic (the first period of the Mesozoic Era, between 250 to 200 million years ago).
A long-necked herbivore
This is a herbivore from the sauropod family, about which scientists know relatively little, except that it was distinguished by its very long neck, long tail, and small head. It could measure over 3 meters in height and up to 5 meters in length and indeed lived in certain regions of Europe.
Moreover, dinosaur bones similar to these have been discovered on the other side of the Bristol Channel, according to Cindy Howells. In 2014, a complete dinosaur skeleton was found on the same beach near Penarth: it was a dracoraptor dating back 201 million years, a carnivore related to the T-rex.
“It’s incredible,” marvels Cindy Howells, “because until recently, we had so few dinosaur discoveries in Wales that we didn’t think we would find many here. In reality, we are now discovering a footprint or a bone every 5-6 years and realizing that we actually had real dinosaurs living in Wales around 15 million years ago.”