Handy prints: Artist's impression of the formation of the tracks by the carnivorous dinosaur Dilophosaurus.
Credit: H. Ky Luterman
The same site has yielded over 1,000 track prints of a variety of dinosaur and early relatives of crocodiles and alligators.
"The discovery of theropod dinosaur tracks are common, but the vast majority of tracks are marks made by the feet, which is understandable given that these were bipedal animals," commented Darren Naish a palaeontologist at Portsmouth University in England.
"Resting traces - made when the animals squatted down and allowed other parts of their bodies to make contact with the ground - are comparatively rare, and they're always exciting because they can provide us with additional details on anatomy," he said
"Dinosaur workers have been saying for a while now that theropods palms faced inwards. Developing hypotheses based on anatomy is fine, but when data is provided by actual, once-living animals – well, that's the icing on the cake and it shows that our anatomical inferences were right on the money," added Naish.
