The Largest Footprint Ever Found and the Oldest Sauropod Trackway

I’ve talked about Titanosaurs before on this blog, but I’ll briefly describe titanosaurs for those just tuning in. Titanosaurs are amazing because of their size. They are the largest animals that ever walked on Earth.

Being that big required a lot of physical changes to keep their bodies functioning. Their limbs were like giant columns to support their weight, they developed a one-way breathing system so they wouldn’t re-inhale stale air from their long necks, and some of them even had armor.

This week’s post comes from a report of the largest dinosaur footprint ever found. The print was discovered in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia (from the Cretaceous), during a joint expedition between Okayama University in Japan and researchers from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. The footprint is 1 meter long and 0.77 meters wide.

Not only is this the largest footprint ever found, it also preserves nail impressions, which are rarely fossilized. Because of this, we can better understand titanosaur walking patterns.

Continuing with sauropods this week, another article was published that re-examined a trackway site in Sichuan, China that dates to the Early Jurassic. Because of its age, it represents the oldest known sauropod trackway. It also preserves something interesting—the sauropod turned. Animals turn while walking all the time, so this might not seem surprising. What’s remarkable is that this behavior is preserved in the fossil record. For an animal as large as a sauropod, the turn is actually quite sharp. This suggests that despite their enormous size, sauropods were still relatively agile.