Hundreds of Dinosaur Footprints on Skye

Published: 1st Dec 2015

Hundreds of Dinosaur footprints have been discovered on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland. The 170 million year old prehistoric trackway was made in the Jurassic period by sauropod dinosaurs. The team of palaeontologists led by Steve Brusatte believe that the sauropods, probably some primitive form of brontosaurus or diplodocus, would have been walking in a shallow lagoon. The evidence of the footprints including the number of toes, their shape, and the heel pads all suggest that the dinosaurs were primitive sauropods that would have grown to at least 15 metres long and would have weighed more than 10 tonnes.

In all throughout the many layers of the rocks there are probably thousands of sauropod footprints in the area and extending under the sea spanning a time period of several thousand years. This makes the site of enormous importance. Trackways can tell a great deal about a dinosaur from the size of the animal, the speed at which it is moving, to such things as social groupings among dinosaurs.