112-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur 'Chase' Reconstructed in 3D
About 112 million years ago, a long-necked sauropod dinosaur traversed some intertidal flats near what is now Glen Rose, Texas. Coming after it — perhaps hours or days later, or perhaps hot on its tail in a dinosaur chase scene — a meat-eating theropod followed, overlaying some of the sauropod's footprints with its own.
This snippet of the Cretaceous ended up frozen in rock, and paleontologists discovered the prints as early as 1917. But an excavation in 1940 led to a third of the trackway vanishing. Now, researchers have reconstructed the entire trackway, all 148 feet (45 meters) of it, using old photography and new technology.
"It's great to get so many stride lengths, so many depths and impressions," said study researcher Peter Falkingham, a research fellow at Royal Veterinary College in London. "There's all this data you can get from an animal moving over quite a long distance."
More on the trail here
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