Massive Footprints Reveal First Ever Adult T Rex Trackway, a 66-Million-Year-Old Walk in North Dakota
The 23-foot sequence of four prints suggests the adult predator was walking about 3.5 to 4.5 mph, researchers said.
- Researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and Liverpool John Moores University published a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology confirming the first trackway ever attributed to an adult T. rex, with the animal moving at approximately 3.5 to 4.5 mph.
- Northglenn High School teacher Kent Hups discovered the 23-foot-long trackway in 2025 on U.S. Forest Service land near Marmarth in North Dakota's southwest corner, where four three-toed footprints were preserved in the Hell Creek Formation approximately 66.5 million years ago.
- The prints' sheer size and narrow toe angle, combined with abundant adult T. rex bones in the surrounding rock, ruled out other animals as the track-maker. Lead author Peter Falkingham, a professor of paleobiology at Liverpool John Moores University, analyzed the trackway remotely using high-resolution 3D surface scanning.
- Three of the four footprints will be recovered by helicopter this fall and transported to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, where senior curator Tyler Lyson emphasized that trackways reveal animal behavior in ways skeletal remains cannot.
- The trackway settles decades of scientific debate over T. rex locomotion, confirming biomechanical models that predicted an unhurried gait rather than the sprinting predator depicted in Jurassic Park. Hups told CBS News the discovery is "the closest you get to a time machine.
45 Articles
45 Articles
A team of researchers made a big discovery in a small town in North Dakota: four T.rex footprints in a row. The team was already able to draw conclusions from the tracks.
Researchers have analyzed several steps of an adult T. rex. The prints reveal how large the dinosaur was and how fast it was estimated to move.
For the first time, a Tyrannosaurus rex fingerprint trail was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in the U.S. state of North Dakota.
Three prints of a gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex are still preserved in the USA after more than 60 million years. Researchers can draw many new insights from the find.
Massive Footprints Reveal First Ever Adult T Rex Trackway, a 66-Million-Year-old Walk in North Dakota
Scientists have confirmed the discovery of the first adult T. rex trackway, providing new insights into how this emblematic predator moved. While a myriad of isolated footprints made by adults in the T. rex species have been found, this is the first time scientists can report a sequence of tracks, or a trackway, left by […]
Look into a world of four million years ago: in North Dakota the footprints of a T-Rex were found. They are huge, as big as half a person. And with them you now know how fast a T-Rex was on the road.
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