Latest news with #footprints
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Dinosaur footprints from 115 million years ago found after Texas flood
Ancient dinosaur footprints dating back 115 million years were discovered in Northwest Travis County, Texas, after recent flooding swept away layers of sediment and brush that had long hidden them, according to officials. The discovery was made in the Big Sandy Creek area over the weekend by a group of volunteers, Travis County Judge Andy Brown, who serves as the county's chief executive, told ABC News. The tracks were found on private property, with the exact location being kept secret at the owner's request. University of Texas paleontologists confirmed at least 15 individual footprints, Matthew Brown, a paleontologist at UT Austin, told ABC News. Each footprint measured approximately 18-20 inches long and dated back 110-115 million years, according to Brown. The tracks were left by meat-eating dinosaurs similar to an Acrocanthosaurus, a roughly 35-foot-long bipedal carnivore, Brown said. Additional prints found nearby might have represented a large herbivorous sauropod dinosaur called Paluxysaurus, which is the official state dinosaur of Texas. MORE: Massive shark caught off the Connecticut coast may break state record Brown and fellow UT Austin paleontologist Kenneth Bader on Tuesday afternoon visited the spot where the tracks were discovered to assess them and to advise officials on protecting them during ongoing flood cleanup efforts. "We expect to return to the site in the near future to more thoroughly document the tracks with maps and 3D imaging," Brown said. He said his team hoped to determine whether multiple dinosaurs moved together as a group or if individuals crossed the area independently. Dinosaur tracks aren't unusual in central Texas, Brown said. "Often people don't realize that it is possible to find them in their own backyards," he said. Last month, deadly floods ravaged parts of central Texas, claiming more than 130 lives. The disaster was severe in Kerr County, where at least 36 children lost their lives at nearby Camp Mystic. According to Brown, the discovery would not impact ongoing cleanup efforts in the area. Local officials encourage anyone who finds additional tracks to report them to the University of Texas paleontology department
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Dinosaur footprints from 115 million years ago found after Texas flood
Ancient dinosaur footprints dating back 115 million years were discovered in Northwest Travis County, Texas, after recent flooding swept away layers of sediment and brush that had long hidden them, according to officials. The discovery was made in the Big Sandy Creek area over the weekend by a group of volunteers, Travis County Judge Andy Brown, who serves as the county's chief executive, told ABC News. The tracks were found on private property, with the exact location being kept secret at the owner's request. University of Texas paleontologists confirmed at least 15 individual footprints, Matthew Brown, a paleontologist at UT Austin, told ABC News. Each footprint measured approximately 18-20 inches long and dated back 110-115 million years, according to Brown. The tracks were left by meat-eating dinosaurs similar to an Acrocanthosaurus, a roughly 35-foot-long bipedal carnivore, Brown said. Additional prints found nearby might have represented a large herbivorous sauropod dinosaur called Paluxysaurus, which is the official state dinosaur of Texas. MORE: Massive shark caught off the Connecticut coast may break state record Brown and fellow UT Austin paleontologist Kenneth Bader on Tuesday afternoon visited the spot where the tracks were discovered to assess them and to advise officials on protecting them during ongoing flood cleanup efforts. "We expect to return to the site in the near future to more thoroughly document the tracks with maps and 3D imaging," Brown said. He said his team hoped to determine whether multiple dinosaurs moved together as a group or if individuals crossed the area independently. Dinosaur tracks aren't unusual in central Texas, Brown said. "Often people don't realize that it is possible to find them in their own backyards," he said. Last month, deadly floods ravaged parts of central Texas, claiming more than 130 lives. The disaster was severe in Kerr County, where at least 36 children lost their lives at nearby Camp Mystic. According to Brown, the discovery would not impact ongoing cleanup efforts in the area. Local officials encourage anyone who finds additional tracks to report them to the University of Texas paleontology department
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Experts Found 23,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn't Exist
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Researchers determined that footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico are from the oldest migrants to North America. The footprints first made headlines after a study published in 2021 claimed that they were thousands of years older than the Clovis people of New Mexico, who had long been thought to be the first North American culture. Who these nomadic people were—or whether they stayed in New Mexico or moved on—is still unknown. An endless ocean of white sprawling across New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, White Sands National Park glitters with dunes of gypsum sand. From those sands have surfaced footprints that would rewrite human history. Found in ancient clay that had long since hardened to stone, the footprints were thought to be anywhere from 21,000 to 23,000 years old. Controversy surrounded the finding—if these tracks really were that ancient, it would mean that they were even older than the Clovis people from the late Pleistocene, whose name comes from a site in New Mexico that was thought to be the oldest known settlement in North America. Whether or not these tracks really did predate the Clovis culture would be debated for years until the investigation was reopened. Archaeologist and geologist Vance Holliday—now a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona—started researching the geologic strata of White Sands in 2012. In 2019, researchers from Bournemouth University in the UK teamed up with the U.S. National Park Service for the excavation that resulted in the discovery of the footprints, and some of Vance's data on the ages of seeds and pollen in the area was used to date the prints for a study published in 2021. If the age of the footprints was correct, that would make them 10,000 years older than the Clovis people. With doubts surrounding that study, Vance became determined to prove their age, and finally succeeded by dating the mud rock they were imprinted on. 'The issue of the arrival of the first Americans has long been contentious and the record from the White Sands locality generated considerable debate focused on the validity of the dating,' he said in a new study recently published in the journal Science Advances. The age of the footprints coincides with the final phase of the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known as the Last Glacial Maximum. Ice sheets that blocked the Bering Land Bridge between Asia and North America made human migration impossible. This could potentially mean that the first people to settle in North America crossed over before Earth plunged into a deep freeze—a time period which aligns with the age of the footprints, as confirmed by Vance. What is now the Tularosa Basin was once the bottom of a paleolake called Lake Otero that formed after the snow and ice melted. Flows of melted snow brought dissolved gypsum to Lake Otero, which emerged as an expanse of white sand when the lake evaporated into a dry playa. Erosion may have erased some of this history forever, but beneath the sand, fossils of megafauna like mammoths and ground sloths were still preserved—alongside the controversial footprints. Whoever made these prints traveled through marshlands before Lake Otero formed and walked through gley—mud that is too waterlogged for oxygen to penetrate. Organisms in the mud instead turn to iron and manganese compounds in this mud to survive, chemically breaking down these compounds and turning the mud shades of blue, green, or gray. The gley was radiocarbon dated to anywhere between 20,700 and 22,400 years old, supporting previous findings that came close to that range. Before this, Vance had relied on pollen remnants and the seeds of the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa (also known as spiral tasselweed or ditchgrass) to date the impressions. 'At the time that the human tracks were created […] there was an extensive body of standing but shallow water or wetlands in proximity to the trackways throughout the period of human activity,' Vance said. If this is proof of what could be the first humans who migrated to the Americas, then why did they only leave footprints? The absence of artifacts might be explained by nomadic life. Vance thinks that one of the trackways was easily walked over in only seconds, and hunter-gatherers might have only been passing through the basin while holding onto tools and supplies that were not easily replaced. Who these enigmatic people were remains a mystery burried in the sands of time. You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Newly Discovered Footprints Dramatically Re-date When Humans First Came to Americas
A new study published in the journal Science Advances confirms that the peopling of the Americas began much earlier than originally thought. Back in 2021, a series of footprints were discovered within the mud of a paleolake bed which had long ago dried up. A 2021 study hypothesized that the prints meant the arrival of settlers to North America occurred somewhere between 23,000 and 21,000 years earlier than previously believed. Now, the new study has confirmed that the footprints were made between 20,700 and 22,400 years ago. "It's a remarkably consistent record," explained lead author Vance Holliday, who was also a co-author on the initial study. "You get to the point where it's really hard to explain all this away. As I say in the paper, it would be serendipity in the extreme to have all these dates giving you a consistent picture that's in error.'Halliday undertook the study for a second time because there was some controversy over the use of ancient pollen and seeds to determine the footprints' age. For this new study, he and his researchers analyzed the mud itself. 'Mud never lies,' Halliday said, explaining that it always holds up to radiocarbon analysis. This most recent study makes the third paper and third laboratory to confirm the timeframe of the footprints' creation. 'It would be serendipity in the extreme to have all these dates giving you a consistent picture that's in error,' Halliday said. The discovery is particularly notable for its lack of artifacts, leading Halliday to posit that the footprints were left by nomadic hunter-gatherers trudging through the lake bed. 'These people live by their artifacts, and they were a long way from where they can acquire replacement material,' he explained. 'They're not just randomly losing artifacts. It's logical…If you're passing through, carrying your gear, you're not leaving it by chance.' The footprints predate the Clovis people, which have long been believed to be the oldest North American humans on record. 'When you stand there and see the prints, you understand they undermine everything you've learned. They're not gesture steps—they're a revolution in human arrival history,' Holliday said. Newly Discovered Footprints Dramatically Re-date When Humans First Came to Americas first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 21, 2025
CNA
14-05-2025
- Science
- CNA
Ancient footprints from Australia reveal earliest-known reptile
Seventeen footprints preserved in a slab of sandstone discovered in southeastern Australia dating to about 355 million years ago are rewriting the history of the evolution of land vertebrates, showing that reptiles arose much earlier than previously known. The fossilized footprints, apparently made on a muddy ancient river bank, include two trackways plus one isolated print, all displaying hallmark features of reptile tracks including overall shape, toe length and associated claw marks, researchers said. They appear to have been left by a reptile with body dimensions similar to those of a lizard, they said. The footprints reveal that reptiles existed about 35 million years earlier than previously known, showing that the evolution of land vertebrates occurred more rapidly than had been thought. "So this is all quite radical stuff," said paleontologist Per Ahlberg of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, who led the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The Australian footprints were preserved in a sandstone slab measuring about 14 inches (35 cm) across that was found on the banks of the Broken River near the town of Barjarg in the state of Victoria. The story of land vertebrates started with fish leaving the water, a milestone in the evolution of life on Earth. These animals were the first tetrapods - meaning "four feet" - and they were the forerunners of today's terrestrial vertebrates: amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds. Footprints in Poland dating to about 390 million years ago represent the oldest fossil evidence for these first tetrapods, which lived an amphibious lifestyle. These creatures were the ancestors of all later land vertebrates. Their descendants split into two major lineages - one leading to today's amphibians and the other to the amniotes, a group spanning reptiles, mammals and birds. The amniotes, the first vertebrates to lay eggs on land and thus finally break free of the water, cleaved into two lineages, one leading to reptiles and the other to mammals. Birds evolved much later from reptile ancestors. The Australian footprints each are approximately 1-1.5 inches (3-4 cm) long. They appear to have been left by three individuals of the same reptile species, with no tail drag or body drag marks. No skeletal remains were found but the footprints offer some idea of what the reptile that made them looked like. "The feet are rather lizard-like in shape, and the distance between hip and shoulder appears to have been about 17 cm (6.7 inches). Of course we don't know anything about the shape of the head, the length of the neck or the length of the tail, but if we imagine lizard-like proportions the total length could have been in the region of 60 cm to 80 cm (24 to 32 inches)," Ahlberg said. "In terms of its overall appearance, 'lizard-like' is probably the best guess, because lizards are the group of living reptiles that have retained the closest approximation to the ancestral body form," Ahlberg added. The modest size of the earliest reptiles stands in contrast to some of their later descendants like the dinosaurs. This reptile probably was a predator because plant-eating did not appear until later in reptilian evolution. The bodies of herbivorous reptiles tend to be big and clunky, whereas this one evidently was lithe with long, slender toes, Ahlberg said. The researchers also described newly identified fossilized reptile footprints from Poland dating to 327 million years ago that broadly resemble those from Australia. Those also are older than the previous earliest-known evidence for reptiles - skeletal fossils from Canada of a lizard-like creature named Hylonomus dating to around 320 million years ago, as well as fossil footprints from about the same time. The reptile that left the Australian footprints lived during the Carboniferous Period, a time when global temperatures were similar to today's, with ice at Earth's poles but a warm equatorial region. Australia at the time formed part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana and lay at the southern edge of the tropics. There were forests, partly composed of giant clubmoss trees. "The tracks were left near the water's edge of what was probably quite a large river, inhabited by a diversity of big fishes," Ahlberg said.
