A high school science teacher volunteering on a dig has found the first known trackway left by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex, a 23-foot record of a walk taken 66.5 million years ago.
Isolated adult T. rex footprints have turned up before. A trackway – a sequence of prints from the same animal, in order – had never been recorded until now, and it changes what scientists can ask.
“Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior. With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape,” said Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who was leading the dig.
“That is incredibly rare for T. rex,” he said.
The four three-toed prints sit in the Hell Creek Formation, on federal land administered by the US Forest Service. The team identified T. rex as the likely track-maker from their size, the narrow shape of the toes and the sheer number of T. rex fossils found nearby.
The findings were published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Hups, who co-authored the paper, has spent his working life telling teenagers that this is how science starts.
“As a teacher, I’m always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation. I never imagined that could lead me to a discovery like this,” he told CBS News.
The team scanned every print in high-resolution 3D, which let lead author Peter Falkingham, a professor of paleobiology at Liverpool John Moores University, examine them in virtual reality from England.
“The technology we’re able to apply in the digital age means my colleagues could scan the tracks in the field and then send the 3D information over to me to visualize on my computer and in VR, enabling me to take as close a look as they did in person,” Falkingham said.
The prints are heavily weathered, so the walking speed is an estimate rather than a measurement.
For Hups, standing in a set of footprints that old did something a fossil in a case cannot.
“It’s the closest you get to a time machine,” he said.
