LONDON: The Isle of Skye sauropods were relatively primitive, perhaps “an early cousin or ancestor of the famous ones like Diplodocus and Brontosaurus”, Brusatte said. “And then we saw another one and another one and another one in this zigzag kind of sequence, and it dawned on us… These are footprints and hand prints left by these biggest dinosaurs of all, these long-necked pot bellied sauropod dinosaurs”.
While fossilized dinosaur bones might look more impressive, footprints can often be more useful to paleontologists, especially “in situ” ones that are discovered where they were left, rather than in rocks that have been detached from their original site.
“The dinosaurs of Scotland are still really poorly known, and it was only about three decades ago that the first dinosaur fossil was found here….”
“This finding clearly establishes the Isle of Skye as an area of major importance for research into the Mid-Jurassic period”.
It was originally believed that sauropods were too heavy to live on land and needed to spend a lot of time in swamps to support their huge bulk. It’s also one of the few places in the world where you can find dinosaurs from this age. They stress that more work will be needed to be sure of the identities of the dinosaurs that made them, but they most resemble those in the Breviparopus and Parabrontopodus groups.
The sauropod was likely more than 44,000 pounds and measured about 50 feet long, Discovery News reported. Footprints “are extremely valuable for filling gaps in our understanding of dinosaur evolution”, Martin says. Looking at how different tracks of footprint overlaps can even tell scientists how different species of dinosaurs interacted.
