10-year-old girl finds dinosaur footprints on the beach
- A 10-year-old girl literally stumbled upon five prehistoric dinosaur footprints while walking on a beach in Wales.
- Experts believe the footprints come from the Camelotia dinosaur, a lesser-known herbivore from the late Triassic period.
- The huge footprints are about 75 centimeters apart and form a uniform pattern, suggesting they were probably left by a dinosaur.
When 10-year-old Tegan went for a walk on the beach in Wales with her mother Claire during the summer holidays, she was probably hoping to find a beautiful shell or two. Instead, she found something much more beautiful and much bigger.
The mother-daughter pair travelled near the Vale of Glamorgan on the South Wales coast, known as a hotspot for prehistoric finds. Still, it was quite a surprise when Tegan found five huge footprints, each about 75 centimetres apart.
“It was so cool and exciting,” Tegan told the BBC. “We were just out there looking to see what we could find. We didn’t think we would find anything. We found these big holes that looked like dinosaur footprints. So mum took some photos, emailed them to the museum and it was of a long-necked dinosaur.”
Claire emailed the National Museum Wales, where Cindy Howells is curator of palaeontology. “These footprints are so big,” Howells said on the BBC’s The Dinohunters, “that they must be a species of dinosaur called Sauropodomorpha.”
More specifically, experts believe the Sauropodomorpha species was a Camelotia, a herbivore from the Late Triassic period. The dinosaur, which was probably about 3 meters tall and 5 meters long, was a distinctive dinosaur known for its long neck, large body, long tail, and small head. It is believed to have sometimes walked on just its hind legs and at other times used all four feet to walk.
The red siltstone at Lavernock Point between Cardiff and Barry is known to contain prehistoric fossils. Dinosaur footprints were found in the last century and in 2014 two brothers discovered a complete skeleton of a Dracoraptor on the same beach near the newly discovered footprints.
“It’s amazing because until recently there were so few dinosaur finds in Wales that we thought there weren’t many dinosaurs here,” Howells said. “Now we find a footprint or bone every five to six years and we know that we’ve had a continuous succession of dinosaurs in Wales for about 15 million years. That’s amazing.”
The first clue that the new find was a dino was the lack of random pattern. Howells said there was a consistent spacing between the five prints, with what appeared to be a left foot, followed by a right foot, then a left and another right.
“This is a pretty significant find. The excitement you get when someone contacts us with a definitive dinosaur find,” Howells said, “is incredible.”
For Tegan and Claire, the beach walk turned into a better fossil hunt than most could have imagined. “It’s hard to comprehend that you’re walking on the same beach where a huge prehistoric animal lived hundreds of millions of years ago,” Claire said. “You can spend a lifetime looking for dinosaur treasures, and for it to happen to Tegan at this age is amazing.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, equipment, infrastructure and more for various publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews include speaking with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
