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Large Dinosaur Footprints Found in Northwest China
Fossils of dinosaur footprints, claimed to be the largest spotted in the world so far, were recently excavated in northwest China's Gansu Province.
More than 100 dinosaur footprints composed of ten groups, were found on the slope of a hill in Yongjing County, most of them intact, according to archaeologists.
Among the footprints, there is one about 1.5 meters long and 1.2 meters wide, known as the largest of its kind in the world.
The footprints came from at least four different kinds of dinosaurs, and the traces of their tails and excrement can also be clearly identified, said Zhao Xijin, an archaeologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Experts initially estimated that the footprints were probably made at least 100 million years ago, in the late Jurassic Period or early Cretaceous Period.
Research results show that the place where the footprints lie used to be part of the shore of a lake.
The footprints were left mainly by a group of phytophagous dinosaurs followed by a few carnivorous ones, experts speculated, adding further studies need to conducted so as to make sure which kinds of dinosaurs the footprints exactly belong to.
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