Earlier this month in southwest China a patron at a restaurant spotted a set of footprints in the stone floor of the courtyard where they were dining.
After the proper authorities were called in to observe and identify, the paleontologists on scene discovered a new set of footprints, which they say belong to two dinosaurs that walked the planet some 100 million years ago.
Paleontologist Dr. Lida Xing was one of the experts called in to investigate. He told CNN that his team used a 3D scanner to confirm that the imprints were left by sauropods.
Sauropods were plant-eaters with small heads and long necks and tails, and they were huge.
“All these dinosaurs hatched out of eggs that were about the size of a grapefruit. So they were kind of like popcorn to the carnivores of their time,”
Riley Black
Their whole game plan, evolutionarily speaking, was to eat a whole bunch of plants and get big as fast as possible.”
And although the time for sauropods to walk the Earth may be long gone, this discovery denotes an exciting time for paleontological research.
“I would say that right now, China, in particular with regards to dinosaur footprints, is undergoing a fossil renaissance. A lot of new and exciting spots are being discovered,”
Scott Persons
Scott Persons, a paleontologist at the College of Charleston. He has worked with the Chinese scientists who made this discovery, though he was not involved in this particular find.
“I have to say, I’ve never gone to a restaurant to discover dinosaur tracks,”
“sometimes when I go on walks around Salt Lake City, a lot of the sidewalks that we have out there are made from early Jurassic sandstone. And I haven’t seen a dinosaur in there yet, but you’ll see little tracks made by proto-mammals and scorpions and spiders that were crawling all over these sand dunes. So there’s really a whole sort of urban paleontology.”
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