news

200 million years old! 10-year-old girl finds dinosaur footprints on South Wales beach

2024-08-19

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

According to the British "Metro" report on August 18, 10-year-old girl Tegan found a unique stone on the beach in South Wales, which had dinosaur footprints preserved on it.

Tegan and her mother Claire were looking for fossils together. They traveled from Ponta Dawe near Swansea to the Vale of Glamorgan and made a discovery in the red siltstone of a section of the coast. This section of the coast is known as a "prehistoric hotspot" where people find footprints or bones every five years or so. In 2014, a complete skeleton of a 201 million-year-old dragon raptor was unearthed here. The dragon raptor is a carnivorous dinosaur and a close relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Tegan found five footprints this time, with a distance of 0.75 meters between them, indicating that this was a fairly large dinosaur. Tegan said: "We found these large holes that looked like dinosaur footprints. My mother took some photos and emailed them to the museum, and finally confirmed that these were footprints of a long-necked dinosaur." Cindy Howells, curator of paleontology at the National Museum of Wales, said that the exact species of the dinosaur has not yet been confirmed, but it is certain that it belongs to the genus Camelotosaurus, a large herbivore in the late Triassic period. This dinosaur had a long neck and tail, walked on two legs, but often stood on four legs to eat grass.

The discovery inspired Tegan. Her mother Claire said: "It's hard to imagine that you are walking on the beach where large prehistoric animals lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Some people spend their whole lives looking for dinosaur treasures, and it's great that Tegan can find them at this age." Cindy said: "In the museum, we don't have a lot of time to go out and explore in person, so we need to rely on people like Tegan to discover so that we can do our work." (China Youth Network translation report)