100 million-year-old footprints — first of their kind — found in Canada. See them
They were discovered in 2000, and Charles Helm, scientific adviser at the Tumbler Ridge Museum, said several of the tracks had been discovered in the years since, prompting him to invite paleontologists to come and take a look, according to an April 14 news release from scientific publisher Taylor & Francis Group.
In 2023, researcher Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum, along with teams from the Tumbler Ridge Museum and the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark finally studied the tracks — and realized they belonged to a species new to science.
Arbour had seen photos of the footprints a few years earlier, and said 'I thought they were really strange and interesting looking and I was really curious about them,' she told CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Then she saw them in person.
'And I got really excited,' Arbour told the news outlet. 'I was like, 'You know, I think the only thing these really can be … is an ankylosaurid.''
Ankylosaurs fall into two groups: one with a flexible tail and four toes on each back foot, and a second with a 'sledgehammer-like tail club' and three toes, according to the release.
These footprints were three-toed and didn't match any previous records of ankylosaurs found in North America, according to a study published on the discovery April 14 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
'While we don't know exactly what dinosaur that made (the) footprints looked like, we know that it would have been about (16.4-19.6 feet) long, spiky and armoured, and with a stiff tail or a full tail club,' Arbour said in the release. 'Ankylosaurs are my favorite group of dinosaurs to work on, so being able to identify new examples of these dinosaurs in British Columbia is really exciting for me.'
The footprints themselves are about 10 inches long and nearly the same distance wide, 'crescentic in form' and five manus, or toes on the front feet, and three pes, or toes on the back feet, according to the study.
The new species was named Ruopodosaurus clava, meaning 'the tumbled-down lizard with a club/mace,' researchers said, noting where the tracks were found and the tail shape of the distinctive dinosaurs, according to the study.
The tracks are believed to be the only tracks from this group ever discovered anywhere in the world, according to the researchers.
'The tracks date back to the middle of the Cretaceous period, about 100 to 94 million years ago. No bones from ankylosaurids have been found in North America from about 100 to 84 million years ago, leading to some speculation that ankylosaurids had disappeared from North America during this time,' according to the release.
The tracks themselves show that multiple animals were walking together, according to the study, and the timeline of footprints shows multiple species of ankylosaur co-existed in the same time period.
In addition to the tracks in Tumbler Ridge, more tracks in a remote region northwest called Bullmoose Creek were also discovered, according to the study.
Scott Persons, a paleontologist studying similar species and not involved in the study, told CBC the new tracks show the ankylosaurs once thought of as 'squat' or like a 'coffee table' actually had 'a surprisingly bird-like gait' and they lined up their feet like 'supermodels on a runway.'
'This track record shows us the coffee table analogy is a little bit flawed,' Persons told CBC. 'The obvious question is: What do these animals look like? All we have are the feet.'
Tumbler Ridge is in east-central British Columbia, Canada's western-most territory.
The research team includes Helm, Arbour, Martin G. Lockley, Eamon Drysdale and Roy Rule.
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