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| Dinosaur Printouts | AllAboutDinosaurs.com Dinosaur Footprints |
Animal Printouts |
The size of dinosaur footprints ranges from just a few inches across to a few feet across (the biggest footprints belonged to the enormous long-necked, long-tailed, plant-eating dinosaur called sauropods). The meat-eating dinosaurs (called theropods) had three-toed feet (like the drawing at the left). The feet of plant-eating dinosaurs varied.
Dinosaur footprints, usually made in mud or fine sand, have been found at over 1500 sites, including quarries, coal mines, riverbeds, deserts, and mountains. There are so many of these fossils because each dinosaur made many tracks (but had only one skeleton) and because tracks fossilize well.
Unfortunately, linking a set of tracks with a particular species is often virtually impossible.
Fossil footprints have yielded information about:
•Speed and length of stride
•Whether they walked on two or four legs
•The bone structure of the foot
•Stalking behavior (a carnivore hunting a herd of herbivores)
•The existence of dinosaur herds and stampedes
•How the tail is carried (few tail tracks have been found, so tails were probably held above the ground).
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