The unexpectedly high tide may have temporarily frustrated Brusatte’s efforts to track down more ichthyosaur fossils to throw more light on these relatively poorly understood predatory marine reptiles, but the team’s discovery of large numbers of footprints more than made up for the disappointment.
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“When we started walking back to our vehicles, I was walking back with one of my colleagues, and we noticed this big depression in the rock”. A land mammal that fed on plants, this discovery offers the strongest proof yet that they weren’t afraid to occasionally dip their toes into the water. The newly found footprints in the lagoon-type sediments, however, provide evidence that the dinosaurs spent some time in the water. “So we’re really just scratching the surface”, Brusatte said.
The size of the footprints – up to 70cms across – their shape, and their distribution, means they could only have been left by plant-eating sauropods. And, he adds, “a lot of the year it’s covered in seaweed, it’s covered in sand after a storm”. The ones that lived in Scotland at the time were probably at least 49 feet (15 metres) long, the authors wrote.
“This find clearly establishes the Isle of Skye as an area of major importance for research into the Mid-Jurassic period”.
Tracks made by sauropod dinosaurs on Skye 170 m years ago.
Few fossils are known from this age, the middle of the Jurassic, University of Edinburgh palaeontologist Tom Challands said.
Paleontologists are as yet uncertain as to why sauropods at the ancient Isle of Skye and other sites around the world regularly skirted the margins of seas, lagoons, and wetlands.
They are the first sauropod prints to be found in Scotland. The only proof available during this period are minimal numbers of bones and teeth fragments.
Scientists at University of Edinburgh have hit a jackpot with the discovery of collection of rare dinosaur tracks on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. With the sun dipping and casting long shadows, protrusions off to one side of one of them looked very much like claws and digits.
“Looking at the chaotic jumble of tracks, it looks like a dance floor, like a dinosaur disco”. “We know from the geology this was a lagoon”, Brusatte said.
“People maybe make that Nessie connection, as they often do whenever there’s any kind of fossil found in Scotland”, Brusatte said. We have three different layers so that is three different time intervals.
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Martin agrees, noting that finding sauropod tracks in coastal habitats is not all that surprising given that these places “provided paths of least resistance for sauropods moving from one place to another” thanks to flat, easy-to-navigate shorelines where predatory dinosaurs would have had more difficulty ambushing prey given the lack of cover.
