Whoops: 150 Million Year-Old Dinosaur Tracks Near Holy Land

First dino tracks found in ancient Arabia
Footprints left by a dinosaur ‘cow’ and a herd of 11 giant sauropods

MSNBC
By Charles Q. Choi
updated 8:57 p.m. CT, Tues., May. 20, 2008


Nancy Stevens / Ohio University
The tracks of an ornithopod dinosaur are preserved
in Yemeni rocks that scientists say were coastal
mudflats 150 million years ago.

LONDON - For the first time, dinosaur footprints have been found on the Arabian Peninsula. In ancient coastal mudflats in Yemen, fossils reveal that a herd of 11 gigantic dinosaurs — sauropods, the largest animals that ever walked on land — tramped deep tracks into the earth that have lasted roughly 150 million years. Nearby, there are tracks of a lone ornithopod — a large, common vegetarian with birdlike, three-toed feet that walked on its hind legs, sometimes referred to as the "cow of the Mesozoic," said researcher Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands. The Mesozoic Era is also known as the Age of Dinosaurs,

Altogether, these new tracks help shed the most light to date on the mysterious history of dinosaurs in the Arabian Peninsula. Only a few dinosaur fossils have been reported so far from the Arabian Peninsula — isolated bones from the Sultanate of Oman and possible fragments of a sauropod from the Republic of Yemen. "No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map," Schulp said. And "big dinosaurs don't live alone," Schulp told LiveScience. "I'm sure there were some carnivorous dinosaurs around as well, as well as much smaller animals, not only dinosaurs."

Just as expert trackers can learn much about their quarry today from tracks, so too can scientists discover critical details about dinosaurs. For instance, the fact that sauropods did not leave furrows from their tails with their footprints means these giants did not drag their lengthy tails behind them. Instead, they must have held them high off the ground, to help balance their bodies, given their equally long necks.

"We really want to learn when did which dinosaurs live where, and why was that?" Schulp said. "How did the distribution change over time, why did one replace another and move from one place to another?"

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"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map..."