Paleontologists have analyzed an exceptionally long sauropod trackway at the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite in Colorado, the United States. Their results show that the giant dinosaur which made it may have been limping.
Aerial view of the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite in Colorado, the United States. Image credit: USDA Forest Service.
University of Queensland paleontologist Anthony Romilio and his colleagues analyzed more than 130 footprints along the 95.5-m track made 150 million years ago.
“This was left in the Late Jurassic when long-necked dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Camarasaurus roamed North America,” Dr. Romilio said.
“This trackway is unique because it is a complete loop.”
“While we may never know why this dinosaur curved back on itself, the trackway preserves an extremely rare chance to study how a giant sauropod handled a tight, looping turn before resuming its original direction of travel.”
“The scale of the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite required a new approach,” said San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Paul Murphey.
“It has been challenging to document these footprints from the ground because of the size of the trackway.”
“We used drones to capture the entire trackway in high resolution.”
“With these images we generated a detailed 3D model, which could then be digitally analyzed in the lab at millimeter-scale accuracy.”
The virtual model reconstructed the sauropod’s movement along the full trackway.
“It was clear from the start that this animal began walking toward the northeast, completed a full loop, and then finished facing the same direction again,” Dr. Romilio said.
“Within that loop we found subtle, yet consistent, clues to its behavior.”
“One of the clearest patterns was a variation in the width between left and right footprints, shifting from quite narrow to distinctly wide.”
“This shift from narrow to wide step placement shows that footprint width can change naturally as a dinosaur moves, meaning short trackway segments with seemingly consistent widths may give a misleading picture of its usual walking style.”
“We also detected a small but persistent difference in left and right step lengths, of about 10 cm (4 inches).”
“Whether that reflects a limp or simply a preference for one side is hard to say.”
“There are many long dinosaur trackways around the world where this method could be applied to extract behavioral information that was previously inaccessible.”
The team’s paper was published in the journal Geomatics.
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Anthony Romilio et al. 2025. Track by Track: Revealing Sauropod Turning and Lateralised Gait at the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite (Upper Jurassic, Bluff Sandstone, Colorado). Geomatics 5 (4): 67; doi: 10.3390/geomatics5040067
