SCOTLAND’S largest dinosaur site, where sauropods the size of three elephants left ancient tracks 170 million years ago when the country was a subtropical paradise, has been mapped for the first time.
The “zigzag” pattern of giant prints on the Isle of Skye was first discovered by the University of Edinburgh’s Steve Brusatte a decade ago while he, along with his students, was on the hunt for the rest of an ancient crocodile’s remains after a friend of his found a tiny little jawbone.
Despite spending a full day on their hands and knees hunting for the rest of the fossil on the coastline in Duntulm, Brusatte discovered that the rockpools they had been searching when it dawned on him they were dinosaur footprints.
“The tide was starting to come in, but we were looking at these rock pools full of barnacles and limpets and all the normal stuff of the seashore, and it just seemed odd that there were so many of these,” Brusatte told The National.
“They were all about the same size and shape.
“Each one was about the size of a car tire, and they seemed to form some sequences.
“There were lines of these things, zigzagging, left, right sequence, and then it dawned on us that these things are dinosaurs, footprints and handprints.”
Brusatte explained that the footprints had been “battered by the tides,” so it was hard to tell what they were at first, but said once he saw it, the team couldn't unsee it.
His team was able to decipher that some of the rocks had little toe or finger impressions on them and that they were made by a dinosaur that walked on all fours.
From there they worked quickly with NatureScot to protect the coastline in a bid to conserve their find.
Ten years later, a new study, led by master's student Paige dePolo, has mapped the footprints left by sauropods, distant relatives of brontosaurus and diplodocus, providing paleontologists a detailed snapshot into the domestic lives of the dinosaurs.
“Paige is a real technical whiz, and she spent all this time flying drones around, making really detailed maps with detailed descriptions, and that's what we have now in this,” Brusatte said.
“This new study is a monographic, full-length, detailed chronicle record of this whole track site.”
The 170-million-year-old prints are in several layers of rocks that formed from sediments at the bottom of a lagoon, when the sea was farther away and more cut off from the land than it is today.
Brusatte said the 3D models of the prints help to show that the dinosaurs were wading in the very shallow water and were likely not threatened by any predators in the area.
He said: “We see trackways, so we see sequences of these things.
Clearly they're moving quite slowly. We don't have any of these things galloping or anything like that.
“We don't have any evidence of them moving in the same direction as a group or predators coming in and chasing them.
“It really just looks like these are just dinosaurs going about their everyday business, and this is a snapshot into the world 170 million years ago, and that's what I think is pretty cool.”
Brusatte added: “These dinosaurs would have had no idea their foot marks were going to be preserved for posterity and we'll be looking at them all this time in the future.”
During the study, dePolo spent her time chronicling the site, describing it in detail, while also photographing and making sketches of all the tracks.
Brusatte explained that she flew drones to capture the tracks and also rigged up a handheld photographic unit on days that were too windy to fly drones, which took pictures in sync with multiple cameras at regular intervals so she could build a detailed digital 3D model of the site.
Experts are now able to carry out more research using the model and analysis aspects like how fast the dinosaurs moved and what their gait was like.
The images also mean that they are able to conserve the tracks in a database, as due to the size of the site, around half a football pitch worth of rock would be impossible to remove.
“They're slowly eroding, and the fact is this map means that we have that chronicled for conservation purposes,” Brusatte said.
He added: “It's just great to have a record of this, and this is a very important site for Scotland.
“I think it probably is the biggest dinosaur site here just in terms of the extent of it and the number of footprints.
“It's a great part of our natural heritage.”
Brusatte added the study is a “full circle” moment for him as it is part of a volume of research papers that commemorates the career of Dr Mike Benton, who was from Aberdeen and was regarded as one of the most respected and decorated paleontologists in the field.
“Mike was my master's supervisor. That's when I first came to Britain,” he said.
“I worked with Mike in Bristol, and now I run a master's course and have my own master's students, and here we have this paper, written by one of them in the volume commemorating Mike.
“So it's very neat for me. A full-circle moment in my career.”
