A ten-year-old British girl has found fossilized dinosaur footprints on the coast of Wales. According to experts, the tracks, about 75 centimeters long, were left by herbivorous dinosaur species about 200 million years ago.
Researcher Tegan and her mother discovered large holes in the rocks while walking on the beach. “We thought they looked like dinosaur footprints,” Tegan told the BBC, which broke the news. I mentioned“So my mother took some pictures and sent them to the museum.”
The National Museum of Wales later confirmed that the fossils must indeed be dinosaur footprints. “These prints are so large that they must be from a sauropodomorph,” museum curator Cindy Howells told the BBC. These dinosaurs, which lived in the Triassic period (250 to 200 million years ago), were herbivores and had a small head on a large body with a very long neck and tail.
In this case, the species is likely to be Camelotia, which roamed Europe 200 million years ago. This dinosaur was probably about three metres tall and five metres long. Not much is known about it, because only a few fossil remains have been found. Howells calls it a “significant discovery”.
hot spot
What is now Wales was hundreds of millions of years ago a barren, rocky, sandy desert, but was increasingly flooded by the sea during the Triassic period. “It became wetter and therefore more suitable for dinosaurs. Wales was like the Mediterranean now, with warm, shallow seas and small islands,” Howells told the BBC.
The Welsh coast is now a hotspot for dinosaur fossils in Europe. In 2014, a complete skeleton of a Dracoraptor, a carnivorous cousin of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, was found here on the same beach where Tegan was discovered. A little further afield, a four-year-old girl also discovered a well-preserved dinosaur footprint in 2021.