The downfall for some dinosaurs (Image: Travel Ink/Getty)

FOLLOWING in someone’s footsteps was a bad idea for a few unlucky dinosaurs. A rare fossil haul of feathered dinosaurs suggests they perished after falling into the deep muddy footprints of larger beasts.

David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, found partial skeletons of 18 small two-legged dinosaurs in the 160-million-year-old sediments from an ancient marsh in China. They were stacked on top of each other, apparently after becoming trapped in roughly circular swampy pits.

The pits contain distinctive red fragments of crust mixed into the mud. The …