A 4-year-old girl walking on a beach with her family in Wales discovered the best preserved dinosaur trail in the area.
The trail is from a beach known for the footprints of crocodilians, extinct ancestors of modernity crocodiles. The dinosaur who made the impression was probably 30 inches (75 centimeters) tall and 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long. Its 4 inch (10 cm) trail is similar to that of the dinosaur Coelophysis, although that particular species lived in North America, not in what today is Europe.
Lily Wilder, a preschooler on a walk with her father in Bendricks Bay, discovered the clue.
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“It was Lily and Richard (her father) who discovered the footprint,” Lily’s mother, Sally Wilder, said in a statement. “Lily saw when they were walking and said ‘Daddy, look.’ When Richard came home and showed me the photograph, I thought it was incredible. Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who pulled it out. “
The print was on a loose stone and has now been removed to the National Museum of Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru in Welsh) with permission from Natural Resources Wales, the government-sponsored body that regulates conservation and environmental issues.
“This fossilized dinosaur footprint from 220 million years ago is one of the best preserved examples from anywhere in the UK and will really help paleontologists get a better idea of how these early dinosaurs walked,” Cindy Howells, curator of paleontology at museum, said in the statement.
The fossil is so detailed that the claws and foot pads are visible. Impression is a type known as a grallator, which means that a bipedal theropod dinosaur with three fingers created it. The dinosaur lived at the beginning of the Triassic period, when the region was a desert dotted with occasional saline lakes. Dinosaurs evolved only about 10 million years before this mysterious three-fingered creature walked through this landscape, so its impression is a tantalizing clue to the history of dinosaurs, according to the National Museum Wales.
“During the COVID pandemic, scientists from Amgueddfa Cymru have highlighted the importance of nature at the doorstep of people, and this is a perfect example of that,” said Howells. “Obviously, not all of us have dinosaur footprints on our doorstep, but there is a wealth of local nature for you if you stop to really look closely.”
Originally published on Live Science.