Whoa! Scientists discovered the world’s largest dinosaur footprints in Australia
Lately, we’ve been inundated with so many fascinating dinosaur updates that it’s hard to keep track, but here’s one that won’t likely become buried beneath a proverbial pile of pre-historic bones: According to TIME, scientists discovered the world’s largest dinosaur footprints in Australia.
Holy crap, this is exciting! It almost makes up for the awful, gut-wrenching manner in which science totally ruined dinosaurs for us (back in the year that shall not be mentioned) by revealing that dinos don’t roar. That was a pretty huge pill to swallow, not much unlike these insanely large dinosaur footprints unearthed in western Australia‘s “Jurassic Park.”
According to The Guardian, scientists say the collection of thousands of footprints belongs to about 21 different types of dinosaur from four different groups and is believed to be the world’s most diverse. A team of paleontologists from the University of Queensland and James Cook University made the discovery in July 2016 and announced their findings in a press statement released on Monday in which the study’s lead author Steve Salisbury referred to it as the “Cretaceous equivalent of the Serengeti.”
So, exactly how big are these prints? Well, let’s just say that there’s no way in hell we’d go anywhere near a stampede of dinosaurs and live to tell about it.
More specifically, the footprints that belong to a herbivore known as a sauropod measured five feet and nine inches in length.
World's biggest dinosaur footprint found in 'Australia's Jurassic Park' https://t.co/7SPOM0WJCW pic.twitter.com/qK1MHKnT7X
— CNN (@CNN) March 27, 2017
The tracks were discovered over a 16-mile stretch of Dampier Peninsula coastline, and are believed to be between 90 and 115 million years old, which means these creatures with gargantuan feet roamed the Earth more than 30 million years before asteroids destroyed the dinosaurs.
