Jurassic Pit Stop

Long-necked herbivores and sharp-clawed carnivores weren’t always enemies. 

Paleontologists recently discovered that the extinct creatures shared the same watering hole some 167 million years ago in what is now the Isle of Skye in northwestern Scotland – mingling peacefully at a prehistoric lagoon that served as a kind of Jurassic pit stop. 

“It was kind of the service station for the Middle Jurassic,” lead author Tone Blakesley of a new study on dinosaur footprints explained to the Washington Post. “The dinosaurs would have come down from the surrounding land masses, drop down for a drink, and move on.” 

First spotted in 2019, Blakesley and his colleagues have since uncovered between 150 and 200 footprints, analyzing 131 for the study. They used drones and 3D imaging to document the site and reconstruct dinosaur movements across the area. 

Some of the prints were nearly 18 inches in length and belonged to Megalosauruses, which were meat-eating dinos and ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex. Other footprints were larger and rounder and likely belonged to plant-eating sauropods, such as Cetiosaurus. 

Based on stride length and footprint size, the researchers estimate that the carnivores moved at a brisk pace – around five miles per hour – while the sauropods lumbered along at about 1.5 miles per hour.  

The tracks were made in soft sand that once lined a shallow freshwater lagoon and were preserved as the sediments hardened over millions of years. 

“It looks like someone has pressed the pause button,” Blakesley told the Guardian. “It’s a surreal feeling to see these footprints with my own eyes, to be able to put my hand in the sole of these footprints.” 

Paleontologist Mike Benton, who was not involved in the study, noted that the discoveries offer a rare insight into “a time when we don’t know much about dinosaurs and other land animals anywhere in the world.”  

“They are really important because they represent fossilized behavior,” Benton told the Post. “In other words, each example shows us exactly what a dinosaur was doing so many million years ago.” 

To see the footprints on the Isle of Skye, watch the short documentary about the discovery featuring Blakesley and other researchers here.