[Image: Gencraft / AI]
Dinosaur bones have given us a pretty good idea of what these ancient creatures were like, but there’s something extra special about their tracks. While bones tell us what dinosaurs looked like, tracks give us a glimpse into their lives—where they walked, how they moved, and maybe even how they played.
That’s why everyone is excited about the idea of finding dinosaur tracks in South Africa.
Since 2008, the Cape South Coast Ichnology Project has been studying ancient footprints along the southern coast. Most of the tracks they’ve found so far are much younger than dinosaurs – dating back to the Pleistocene Epoch, which started about 2.6 million years ago. But the team had a hunch that if they looked in the right places, they might find tracks that were much, much older.
They already knew the Western Cape had Mesozoic-era rocks, some of which could have preserved dinosaur tracks. And, having studied tracks in Canada, they had an eye for what to look for. So in 2022, they set off to explore a few promising sites along the Cape coast. A year later, they went back for a deeper investigation.
And they found them.
Once they knew what to look for, it was clear – dinosaur tracks weren’t actually all that rare around here, per The Conversation.
In a new paper published in the journal Ichnos, we describe our findings in detail, presenting evidence of tracks of sauropods (enormous plant-eating dinosaurs) and possibly ornithopods (another group of large herbivorous dinosaurs).
The tracks were found in a rugged, remote, breathtakingly spectacular coastal setting. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs walked through estuaries here. Some left their marks on sandy tidal bars, while others trudged through muddy channels. Some may have even been wading or wallowing in the soft sediment.
These tracks are roughly 140 million years old, from the dawn of the Cretaceous period, a time when Africa and South America were starting to drift apart. What’s even more remarkable is that they’re the first dinosaur tracks ever found in the Western Cape – and they seem to be the youngest ones discovered in southern Africa so far.
Tracking dinosaurs isn’t as simple as finding a perfect footprint in the sand. In this area, large, flat surfaces where prints might be preserved are rare. Instead, they had to look at vertical rock faces, where tracks appear in profile. And that gets tricky because other things – like earthquakes – can cause similar-looking rock formations.
For years, scientists assumed the deformed rock layers in these Early Cretaceous formations were caused by seismic activity. But research has come a long way, and they now have a better idea of what dinosaur footprints look like when they’re preserved in cross-section. After studying the rocks closely, they realized that what they were seeing was a mix of both earthquake-related and dinosaur-made deformations.
More proof that dinosaurs roamed the Western Cape comes from fossils found in the area. Cretaceous-age bones have been discovered in the Eastern Cape’s Kirkwood region, and a few have even turned up in the Western Cape – including a theropod tooth correctly identified by a 13-year-old boy!
So it’s not shocking that dinosaurs once walked here – but finding their actual footprints is still an incredible moment.
And the team is not stopping here. They’re planning to keep searching for more dinosaur tracks along the coast, and they hope this discovery sparks excitement for future explorers. Who knows what else is waiting to be found?
[Source: The Conversation]
