The Discovery
A rare trail of four massive footprints in the North Dakota badlands offers insight into how an adult Tyrannosaurus rex moved across the ancient landscape. Discovered in 2025 by high school teacher Kent Hups near Marmarth, the trackway sits on public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service within the Dakota Prairie Grasslands. Researchers dated the 23-foot trail to about 66.5 million years ago, located roughly 108 feet below the top of the Hell Creek Formation.
What Scientists Found
The trail consists of two left and two right prints. Each track is about 3 feet long, and the clearest print spans roughly 31 inches in width. Key observations from the scientific team include:
- Step Spacing: The dinosaur covered approximately 13 feet from one left footstep to the next.
- Movement Pace: Calculations indicate a pace of about 3.5 to 4.5 mph, comparable to a brisk human walk, though physical wear on the prints suggests the predator may have moved even slower.
- Anatomy and Scale: The narrow, immense three-toed shapes differentiate these tracks from broad-toed plant-eaters like Edmontosaurus and from much smaller juvenile tyrannosaur prints found in other regions.
- Natural Preservation: The tracks survived because groundwater rich in calcium carbonate cemented the flooded river mud around each step into hard mineral lumps, which remained intact as softer surrounding rock eroded over time.
Why It Matters
Fossilized bones reveal structural details, but continuous trackways capture live behavior. While isolated adult T. rex tracks have been documented previously, a multi-step path allows researchers to estimate the animal's actual stride and pace. In early October, three of the footprints were lifted by helicopter and moved to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for further research, with the full study appearing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Source: t rex brachiosaurus paleontology - BingNews · Published October 28, 2026 · Photo by Dare Artworks on Unsplash
