The Discovery
In 2025, Kent Hups, a high school teacher and amateur fossil hunter from Colorado, came across a remarkable set of footprints near Marmarth, North Dakota. Located on federal land within the Hell Creek Formation, the discovery consists of four three-toed prints stretching across roughly 7 meters of ancient floodplain. Prior to this event, scientists had only found two isolated adult Tyrannosaurus rex footprints in the entire world—one in Montana and one in New Mexico. This site provides the first continuous trackway from an adult T. rex ever documented.
What Scientists Found
Pressed into soft mud 66.5 million years ago during the late Maastrichtian age, each footprint is larger than an overhead bin carry-on bag. Because weathering limits fine anatomical details, researchers cannot confirm the species identity with total certainty, but four factors point directly to an adult T. rex:
- Exceptional print size
- Narrow toe impressions
- The late Maastrichtian age of the rock
- The high density of T. rex skeletal remains throughout the Hell Creek Formation
The trackway features two left and two right footprints. Measurements show a stride length of roughly 4 meters between consecutive prints of the same foot, revealing that the animal was traveling at a relaxed, human-like walking pace rather than sprinting.
Why It Matters
Footprints preserve moments of living behavior that fossilized bones alone cannot convey. The prints endured because fine sandstone filled the original impressions shortly after they were made, and mineralized groundwater cemented them into durable casts before the surrounding softer rock eroded away over millions of years.
The research, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, was co-authored by Hups, lead author Peter Falkingham of Liverpool John Moores University, and researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Following federal coordination with the U.S. Forest Service, three of the excavated prints are scheduled to be transported by helicopter to the museum under the direction of senior curator Tyler Lyson, placing this rare scientific evidence on public display.
Source: t rex brachiosaurus paleontology - BingNews · Published October 20, 2026 · Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash