Researchers find over 260 matching dinosaur footprints on opposite sides of Atlantic Ocean
Researchers discovered hundreds of matching dinosaur footprints just an ocean apart.
In a study published by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, the team led by paleontologist Louis Jacobs of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas found over 260 matching sets of footprints in Brazil and Cameroon from dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago.
According to an SMU press release, as shared by PEOPLE Magazine, the said footprints show where the dinosaurs were last able to cross between South Africa and America before the two continents split.
Jacobs noted the shapes were "almost identical."
Diana Vineyard, the study's co-author who's also a research associate at the SMU, said majority of the footprints were created by three-toed theropod dinosaurs. A few of them also most likely came from sauropods or ornithischians.
The footprints were discovered over 3,700 miles (5,900 kilometers) away from each other. They were made 120 million years ago on a "supercontinent known as Gondwana," according to the researchers.
As stated in the Brittanica encyclopedia, Gondwana incorporated present-day South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica. It was fully assembled by the late Precambrian period some 600 million years ago.
The first stage of its breakup began in the early Jurassic period about 180 million years ago.
Jacobs said before Africa and South America split apart, “Plants fed the herbivores and supported a food chain. Muddy sediments left by the rivers and lakes contain dinosaur footprints." This, according to him, showed proof that “these river valleys could provide specific avenues for life to travel across the continents 120 million years ago."