Nessie may be a mythical creature, but Scotland was once home to enormous dinosaurs that waded in shallow waters.

Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleague Tom Challands stumbled across several hundred footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago.

The size of the prints – up to 70 centimetres across – suggests they were left by early sauropods. “They had a bigger footprint than T. rex,” says Brusatte.


The largest creatures to ever have lived on land, these massive plant-eaters weighed around 20 tonnes, were up to 15 metres long and several storeys high.

This is the largest discovery of dinosaur footprints in Scotland. And it helps to piece together how and where these behemoths lived.

“These dinosaurs weren’t swimmers but they would have been moving around knee-deep in this brackish lagoon. Maybe the plants there were a good food source or maybe they got some protection from other dinosaurs there,” says Brusatte.

Chance finding

Brusatte and Challands stumbled across the dinosaur tracks in April, at the end of a long day of scouting for fossil fish teeth and crocodile bones.

They were heading back to their car when they caught sight of an exposed platform of rock covered in big impressions, a bit like potholes. “Then we noticed there was a zigzag shape to them,” says Brusatte.

Very few fossil bones survive from the Middle Jurassic period and there are few sites of sauropod tracks worldwide.

“This is a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the reconstruction of sauropods’ way of life,” says Diego Castanera, a palaeontologist at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. “The discovery opens a new window into the interpretation of how primitive sauropods walked and is one of the first steps in understanding how locomotion evolved in this kind of dinosaur.”

Brusatte and Challands also discovered a single three-toed print at the site, which they believe is likely to have belonged to some sort of plant-eating iguanodon.

“We’re trying to understand what it was like when Scotland was much warmer, long before there were flowering plants”, Brusatte says. “When it was a smaller island with incredible ecosystems and almost unimaginable animals.”

Journal reference: Scottish Journal of Geology, DOI: 10.1144/sjg.2015-005

Read more: “Stunning fossils: Dinosaur death match”

Image credits: top image: Jon Hoad; second image: Steve Brusatte