During the first part of the nineteenth century, Mary Anning was engaged in revolutionizing paleontology. How did she pull it off? Going for beach walks is a good way to start. She found so many fossils and inspired so much public interest on Britain’s Jurassic Coast, in Dorset that even large museums could not keep up with demand. Visitors to the Dorset coast still expect to uncover their own Jurassic-era fossil, and many do.
However, that is not the only part of the country where a stroll along the beach can turn up an ancient relic or two. last year, in Penarth, Wales, another amateur paleontologist discovered a set of imprints in the ground that have identified as the footprints of a 200-million-year-old Triassic sauropod in a newspaper published this week in the journal Geological Magazine. The Natural History Museum’s paleontologist Dr. Susannah Maidment remarked, “We get a lot of requests from members of the public seeking objects that may represent trackways.”
“However, there are several geological characteristics that might be mistaken for them.” However, we believed the images [provided by amateur paleontologist Kerry Rees] were a reasonable candidate for anything that may be tracked and that it would be worth investigating.”
They were not the first paleontologists to do so, either. When they dug a bit deeper, they discovered that the site had already been investigated by a few prior excavation teams: one from France, another from nearby Cardiff University, and one that included Cindy Howells of the National Museum of Wales, one of the paper’s co-authors. That background proved to be crucial. While the team “believed the impressions we saw at Penarth were consistently spaced to suggest an animal walking,” said fellow Natural History Museum paleontologist Professor Paul Barrett, the prints lacked something crucial: toes. “Where mud had been pushed up… [it’s] characteristic of active movement through the soft ground,” Barrett explained.
Now, this may seem self-evident, but feet have toes, and as a result, footprints have toeprints. Could the crew be confident they were looking at an ancient trackway if they could not discover toes? Fortunately, the French crew photographed the scene. The NHM paleontologists could tell that the prints did have characteristics that looked like toes back then – those smaller imprints had just faded away in the ten years after the French survey.
The crew was now confident that the imprints were footprints, but they had a new question: who produced them? These kinds of tracks are “not especially frequent worldwide,” according to Barrett, and “[the] record of Triassic dinosaurs in [the UK] is pretty sparse” – but there were other hints nearby that might help them identify the heavy-footed walker. “We know early sauropods lived in Britain at the time because bones of Camelotia, a very early sauropod, have been discovered in Somerset in rocks dated to the same era,” Maidment stated.
The traces thought to have been left by one of these extremely early sauropods, albeit not necessarily Camelotia itself. In scientific terms, the find is an Eosauropus: a trackway left by an undiscovered species of an exceptionally early sauropod. The progeny of this trackmaker would go on to become some of the most famous dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, during the following few hundred million years. “We don’t know if [Camelotia] was the trackmaker,” Maidment continued, “but it’s another hint that something similar to it may have created these recordings.”
Unfortunately, the footprints will have to left on the beach to wash away over time — institutions find it impossible to remove trackways – therefore the team has instead captured state-of-the-art 3D photographs of the tracks for future scholars to analyse. “We feel this is a fascinating contribution to our understanding of Triassic life in the United Kingdom,” Barrett added. “Anything we can find from the time period helps to our understanding of what was going on.”
