A remarkable set of dinosaur footprints discovered in Colorado is giving scientists new clues about how a massive, long-necked dinosaur moved more than 150 million years ago.
The unusual trail not only forms a complete loop, but also contains subtle signs that the animal may have been limping as it walked.
The footprints were found near Ouray, Colorado, at a site known as the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite.
The trackway is one of the most continuous and tightly curved paths ever found for a sauropod, the group of enormous, plant-eating dinosaurs that includes famous species like Diplodocus and Camarasaurus.
Dr. Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab studied more than 130 individual footprints along the 95.5-metre trail.
The dinosaur left these prints during the Late Jurassic period, when long-necked giants roamed what is now North America. His findings were published in the scientific journal Geomatics.
What makes this trackway especially rare is that it forms a complete loop. The dinosaur started walking in a north-eastern direction, slowly turned in a tight curve, completed a full loop, and then ended up moving in the same direction again.
Scientists don’t know why the animal turned back on itself, but the preserved footprints provide a rare opportunity to study how such a huge creature managed a sharp, looping turn.
Because of the scale of the site, studying the footprints from the ground proved challenging. To capture the full trackway in detail, researchers used drones to take thousands of high-resolution photos from above.
These images were then turned into a highly detailed 3D digital model, allowing the team to examine the track at millimetre-level accuracy back in the lab.
The digital reconstruction revealed several interesting patterns. As the dinosaur made its loop, the distance between its left and right footprints changed. Sometimes the steps were quite narrow, while at other points they spread much wider apart.
This suggests that footprint width can change naturally as a large dinosaur moves and turns, meaning shorter trackways might not always accurately represent an animal’s typical walking style.
Even more intriguing was a small but consistent difference between the lengths of the left and right steps. The difference was about 10 centimetres, or four inches. This subtle imbalance could indicate that the dinosaur had a slight limp, possibly due to an injury or physical strain. However, it could also reflect a natural preference for one side, similar to how humans might favour one leg over the other.
According to the researchers, many long dinosaur trackways exist around the world, and the same careful analysis used here could be applied to uncover more details about how dinosaurs moved and behaved.
These ancient footprints do more than just mark where a dinosaur walked — they offer a rare glimpse into its life, habits, and possibly even its injuries, frozen in stone for millions of years.
Source: University of Queensland.
