One hundred million years ago, a baby stegosaurus walked on its hind legs in what is now China.
The imprint of this all adorable, the size of a cat from Cretaceous period was discovered in Xinjiang, a territory in northwestern China. At just 5.7 centimeters (2.25 inches) long, it is the smallest stegosaur footprint ever found, the authors reported on March 3. in Palaios magazine.
The site where the tiny fingerprints were found was also marked with large traces of stegosaurs – a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that included the genus Stegosaurus – which had an average length of about 29 cm in length at the hind leg and a length of about 5.3 inches (12.7 cm) at the front leg. There was a small fingerprint with the distinctive three-fingered shape of the stegosaurs. It is not clear to which species the imprint belonged, but the skeletal remains of a species called Wuerhosaurus homheni were found in the area. This species is known only from fragmented bones, but scientists know that it wore the iconic back plates for which stegosaurs are famous.
“That Stegosaurus“This little dinosaur probably had tail tips and bone plates along its back as an adult,” said study co-author Anthony Ramilio, a researcher in the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Laboratory. he said in a statement.
Possible small stegosaur footprints have been found before, although it is controversial whether they really belonged to the children of stegosaurs. Small traces were found near Morrison, Colorado, in Jurassic rocks (199 million to 145 million years ago), but not all paleontologists agree that these traces are fossils. One of the co-authors of the new paper, paleontologist Marin Lockley, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado in Denver, says that these prints are actually just irregularly shaped pieces of mud embedded in tiles.
Unlike the larger tracks on the Xinjiang site, the small rail was not elongated. This has been interesting to researchers, as it suggests that the baby stegosaurus may not have moved like its adult counterparts.
“Stegosaurs usually walked with their heels on the ground, just like humans, but on all fours, which creates long marks,” Romilio said. “The small route shows that this dinosaur was moving with its heel raised from the ground, just like today a bird or a cat. I’ve seen shortcuts like this before only when dinosaurs walked on two legs. “
Baby stegosaurs may walk on their hind legs as they grow to four feet as they grow, said study co-author Lida Xing, a paleontologist at the Chinese University of Geosciences in Beijing.
“A complete set of pieces of these small fingerprints would give us the answer to this question, but unfortunately we only have one fingerprint,” Xing said in a statement.
Originally published on Live Science.