When you hear the word “dinosaur”, the first thing that might spring to mind is a hulking skeleton like Sue the T rex in Chicago’s Field Museum or Sophie the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London. Dinosaur skeletons give us striking evidence of what these ancient animals looked like, from the plates and spikes on stegosaurs like Sophie to the long-necked, airplane-sized bodies of titanosaurs.
However, despite their iconic status as museum centerpieces, skeletons are not the most common type of dinosaur fossil known. That prize goes to dinosaur footprints.
The abundance of dinosaur footprints is intuitive. Each dinosaur could only leave one skeleton – but on any single day of its life, it could make thousands of footprints. So, even if only a tiny fraction were fossilised, we could expect to see many more of them in the fossil record.
