10-Year-Old Girl Discovers Dinosaur Footprints on Beach

A mother and her 10-year-old daughter accidentally discovered dinosaur footprints on a beach in Wales while searching for fossils. The Natural History Museum is carrying out routine checks but the director says she is “almost certain” they are the footprints of a 200-million-year-old herbivore.

Little Tegan and her mother Claire were walking along a beach in South Wales during their summer holidays when they came across dinosaur footprints that were more than 200 million years old, the British channel reported on Saturday, August 17. BBC.

The 10-year-old and her mother travelled to the coast between Cardiff and Barry specifically to search for fossils in the Vale of Glamorgan, known as a hotspot for prehistoric discoveries.

“We didn’t really think we would find anything,” says Claire, the astonished mother, who immediately took photos of the large holes they found to email to the National Museum of Wales.

Fixed distance between each fingerprint

Cindy Howells, curator of palaeontology at the National Museum of Wales, said she was “almost certain” these were real dinosaur footprints. Speaking to the BBC, she said she was “convinced” of their authenticity by the “regularity of their footsteps”, even though verification was currently underway to confirm this was the case.

“We have five footprints with a distance of about 1 meter and 50 between each one. It would be doubtful that they are random holes but in this case we have a left foot, a right foot, then a left foot and a right foot… there is a fixed distance between them,” the specialist explains.

According to paleontologists, the enormous, widely spaced footprints could be those of a type of four-legged dinosaur called Sauropodomorpha that lived during the Triassic period (the first period of the Mesozoic Era between -250 and -200 million years ago).

long necked herbivore

It is a herbivorous animal from the sauropod family, and scientists know little about it, except that it was characterized by its very long neck, long tail, and small head. It could reach a height of more than 3 meters and a length of 5 meters, and it actually lived in certain areas of Europe.

Especially since similar dinosaur bones have been discovered on the other side of the Bristol Channel, says Cindy Howells. In 2014, a complete dinosaur skeleton was found on the same beach near Penarth: it was a 201-million-year-old Dracoraptor, a carnivorous cousin of T-Rex.

“It’s incredible, because until recently we had so few dinosaur finds in Wales that we didn’t think we would have many here,” says Cindy Howells. “In fact, we’re now finding a footprint or a bone every 5-6 years and we’re realising that we already had dinosaurs living in Wales about 15 million years ago.”