Dinosaur Footprints Found In Isle Of Skye In Scotland

Photo: CoreyFord (Getty Images)

While Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom isn’t out until June, we’re still talking about dinosaurs and that’s because dinosaur footprints have been found in Scotland and it’s reeling in the internet.

According to The Guardian, researchers have found about 50 tracks belonging to dinosaurs that walked around the Isle of Skye. Published in the Scottish Journal of Geology, the study states that the island shows hundreds of footprints, most from the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods. But the site also shows new information: that these plant-eaters also shared their space with meat-eaters.

The Guardian

Around 170 million years ago, shortly after the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up, the land that is now Skye was part of a smaller subtropical island, far closer to the equator, and replete with beaches, rivers and lagoons.

“This was a subtropical kind of paradise world, probably kind of like Florida or Spain today,”Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist says. “[These prints] were made in a shallow lagoon – dinosaurs walking in very shallow water.”

One of Brusatte’s students stumbled across the tracks in 2016 while on a field trip along Skye’s coast. “The tide went out and we noticed them,” said Brusatte. “We knew that you could find these things in Scotland and if you were walking on tidal platforms and you saw holes in the rock, they could, possibly, be footprints.”

Some of the footprints, said Brusatte, were as big as a car tyre. “There were also handprints associated with those tracks – so these were made by a dinosaur walking all fours, a big dinosaur, and the dinosaur that fits the bill is a sauropod – one of these long-necked, pot bellied, brontosaurus-type dinosaurs,” said Brusatte, adding that they would have been up to 15 meters in length and weighed more than 10 tonnes. “They were the biggest things living on land at the time,” he said.

But the team also found impressions made by three-toed dinosaurs, probably theropods. “These are the tracks of the meat eaters,” said Brusatte. “[There were] only footprints, no handprints: this was a dinosaur just walking on its hind legs,” he added, saying the creature would have weighed about a tonne and was around five or six meters in length. “Kind of a primitive cousin of a T-Rex,” said Brusatte.

“These dinosaurs look like they were just lingering, they were just kind of loitering,” Brusatte adds. “This seems to be a snapshot into a day in the life of some dinosaurs and I think that is just pretty cool.”

What do you think? ‘Jurassic Park’ Would Be Way Funnier If It Starred The Dinosaurs From ‘Dinosaurs’

If they somehow don’t clone dinosaurs from this then what the hell are they doing? I think it’s time some crazy rich guy invest a ton of cash into making this happening. What is Trump up to these days?