When a simple walk on the beach turns into a priceless scientific discovery… This story doesn’t happen entirely by chance. Because if Tegan, 10, found herself playing the explorer in the summer of 2024 during a walk with her mother on the rocks of Lavernock Point, south of Cardiff, Wales, it’s because the place is a prehistoric hotspot, famous for its fossils and dinosaur footprints. The first were discovered there in 1879. Budding paleontologists have fun spotting them at low tide, when the water, as it recedes, reveals what looks like large holes in the stone, spaced evenly. Except that Tegan has stumbled upon a treasure.
That day, the little dinosaur hunter examines each rock with a sharp eye, when her gaze stops on strange cavities that no one had told her about. Five huge holes as big as her foot, 75 centimetres apart, in a near-straight line. Seen from the sky in particular, it is quite visible. Her mother takes photos. The paleontologists at the National Museum are adamant: no one had ever seen these footprints before.
When 10-year-old Tegan went for a summer holiday beach stroll with her mum, she had no idea they would actually be walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs.
Verifications are underway to establish their authenticity, but they were most likely left by a huge long-necked herbivore that measured three metres high. It lived more than 200 million years ago, when Wales was nothing more than a huge, very hot and very dry desert. Tegan’s comment reported by the BBC: “it was so cool and exciting!”.
Every five or six years, a new discovery
This discovery is not so rare. “Today, we discover a footprint or a bone every five or six years,” Cindy Howells, a dinosaur expert for 40 years in this region of the United Kingdom, explains to the BBC. In 2014, on the same beach as Tegan’s, for example, the complete skeleton of a carnivorous cousin of the T-rex was unearthed. A little further away, in 2021 (a microsecond on the scale of dinosaurs), a 4-year-old child discovered a small, very well-preserved three-toed footprint dating back 220 million years. These pieces were extracted and exhibited at the museum.
But Tegan’s footprints will also be a milestone, because they will considerably help paleontologists to better understand these prehistoric giants, to define with much more precision their behavior, their movements, their ecosystem. Not to mention that it’s a nice publicity stunt, which should attract more tourists to this strip of the Welsh coast.
This article is originally published on francetvinfo.fr
