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Triassic dinosaur with giant 'murder feet' wasn't so big after all, scientists find - Livescience.com

Triassic dinosaur with giant 'murder feet' wasn't so big after all, scientists find - Livescience.com

Triassic dinosaur with giant 'murder feet' wasn't so big after all, scientists find - Livescience.com
Oct 21, 2021 1 min, 35 secs

A dinosaur that lived in Australia 220 million years ago left behind footprints that hinted that it was a fierce predator.

But when they re-examined the tracks, they found that the shape and proportions of the three-toed foot were unlike those of other theropod dinosaurs — bipedal meat eaters — at the time, and were probably made by a smaller type of plant-eating dinosaur called a prosauropod, according to the new study.

To date, footprints represent the only evidence in Australia of dinosaurs from the Triassic period (251.9 million to 201.3 million years ago).

Coal miners discovered the newly analyzed tracks in the roof of a mine in 1964, 699 feet (213 m) below the surface, and the individual footprints measured between 16 and 17 inches (40 and 43 centimeters) in length, the scientists wrote in the study.

"It must have been quite a sight for the first miners in the 1960s to see big, bird-like footprints jutting down from the ceiling," lead study author Anthony Romilio, a paleontologist and research associate at The University of Queensland in Australia, said in a statement. .

Over time, sediment filled in the tracks and hardened to preserve the impressions; the plants underneath then transformed into coal, and the sand covering the tracks turned to sandstone, Romilio told Live Science in an email. .

They compared the model and measurements of the footprint images with those of other dinosaur footprints from the Triassic, and found that their print differed from those of Triassic theropod dinosaurs (fossilized footprints from this group are known as Eubrontes). .

Theropod footprints are usually long and narrow; by comparison, this print was "too wide" to belong to a theropod, Romilio said.

Instead of resembling the theropod track called Eubrontes, our track looked like tracks named Evazoum," Romilio explained.

Originally published on Live Science.

Mindy Weisberger is a Live Science senior writer covering a general beat that includes climate change, paleontology, weird animal behavior, and space

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