3-toed dinosaur footprint found in B.C. leads to discovery of new species
One relatively small step taken 100 million years ago is now one giant leap for scientists.
A fossil of a dinosaur footprint has led to the discovery of a new species that once roamed B.C. near Tumbler Ridge.
“When we started to see some of these unusual, clearly ankylosaur footprints, but they only have three toes, we were kind of able to make this connection that, OK, these are specifically being made by the ones with tail clubs,” Victoria Arbour, the paleontology curator at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, told Global News.
Dr. Charles Helm, the Tumbler Ridge Museum scientific adviser, said this discovery is enormous due to the three toes.
The dinosaur that made them is said to be between five and six metres long, spiky and armoured with a stiff tail or full club. The team reported their findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, officially naming the species Ruopodosaurus clava, meaning the tumbled-down lizard with a club or mace.
“That’s referencing that these footprints are from the Tumbler Ridge area, which has been, really, they’ve really sort of taken on armoured dinosaur footprints as like the emblem of that area, so it’s nice to be able to make a nod to that with this new species,” Arbour added.
No bones from Ankylosaurids have ever been found in North America, leading to some speculation they had disappeared between 184 million years ago.
But the footprints fill the gap in the skeletal fossil record, confirming they were indeed alive and well, coexisting in the same region with their four-toed counterparts.
“That’s a really cool thing to find the three-toed and the four-toed in the same layer at the same site,” Helm said. “I think the public is going to want to see this.”
It’s proof there’s still a world of discovery right beneath our feet.
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