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10-year-old’s curiosity leads to discovery of ancient dinosaur footprints on a beach | Trending


10-year-old’s curiosity leads to discovery of ancient dinosaur footprints on a beach | Trending

August 19, 2024, 18:11 IST

According to paleontologists, the huge footprints that the girl found were created 200 million years ago, in the late Triassic period.

Many of us have a habit of picking up shells and stones while wandering around the beach. That’s what 10-year-old girl Tegan from the UK did too. However, her curiosity actually led to the discovery of five giant footprints that experts believe belonged to a Camelotia dinosaur that lived there more than 200 million years ago. According to reports, the discovery was made on a beach in South Wales.

The dinosaur footprints were discovered on a beach in South Wales. (Unsplash)
The dinosaur footprints were discovered on a beach in South Wales. (Unsplash)

The giant footprints Tegan found are believed to date back to the late Triassic period, palaeontologists say, around 200 million years ago. The prints correspond to a left foot, a right foot, and then another left and right foot, 75 centimeters apart. Experts are still working to confirm the findings, the BBC reported. (Read also: Billionaire breaks auction records by paying $45 million for dinosaur skeleton)

Tegan told the news agency: “It was so cool and exciting. We were just out there looking to see what we could find and didn’t think we would find anything. We found these big holes that looked like dinosaur footprints, so mum took some photos and emailed them to the museum. It was from a long-necked dinosaur.”

The leading dinosaur expert in the British region where the footprints were found, Cindy Howells, believes the footprint is from a Camelotia. These long-necked dinosaurs roamed parts of Europe. However, relatively little is known about this species compared to what scientists know about other dinosaurs such as Triceratops and T-Rex. Camelotia are thought to have been herbivorous animals that lived in the Late Triassic period.

“A Camelotia would have been about 3m (10ft) tall and 4-5m (13-16ft) long and is an early sauropodomorph with a relatively long neck, a long tail and walked on two legs but could walk on all fours when grazing for food. It’s amazing because until recently we had so few dinosaur finds in Wales that we thought we didn’t have many dinosaurs here,” Howells told the BBC.

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