Scientists from the Environment Agency, JBA Consulting and the Dinosaur Isle Museum have found rare footprints of iguanodontian dinosaurs on Yaverland seafront, the Isle of Wight, England.
The 125-million-year-old Mantellisaurus footprints found on the Isle of Wight. Image credit: JBA Consulting / Environment Agency.
The newly-discovered footprints date back 125 million years to the middle Cretaceous period.
They came from Mantellisaurus, an iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in what is now Europe during the Cretaceous.
“Mantellisaurus was 7 m (23 feet) long and had three toes on each foot,” said Dr. Martin Munt, curator of the Dinosaur Isle Museum at Sandown, and colleagues.
“It hit the scales at a whopping 750 kg, but not the biggest dinosaur by any means.”
“A fully-grown Mantellisaurus would have been almost twice the length of an average car, marching a slow thunder with huge strides that have clearly left their mark on time.”
What the researchers now call the Isle of Wight was perfect habitat for dinosaurs, generating a diverse collection of fossils over millennia.
“The Isle of Wight is the richest dinosaur location in Europe, but this is still a wonderful find,” Dr. Munt said.
“We have located 35 different types, and the area was once also heavy with plants, crocodiles, pterosaurs, amphibians, fish and invertebrates like insects and freshwater mussels.”
“We cannot be totally sure about a print’s identity, but the three-toed feet make it likely Mantellisaurus was here, not just in other parts of the south coast where they were more common — or that’s what we thought until now.”
“This represents a hugely important and significant discovery for the project, as finding the new footprints makes it clear that the land on which the dinosaurs walked is likely to stretch the whole length of Yaverland beach,” said Stuart Noon, heritage lead for JBA Consulting.
“The latest capture cements the Isle of Wight as Britain’s dinosaur capital. The reptile-revealing rocks are known as the Wessex Formation, a magnet for geologists and paleontologists.”
“Dinosaurs existing right where our team is working brings old and new together — the modern challenges of combatting climate change with a period of time we can only imagine,” said Nick Gray, Environment Agency’s flood and coastal-risk manager for the Solent and South Downs area.
“We’ve all read the stories and seen the films, but this gives us just a hint of what life was like.”
“Reducing coastal flood and erosion risk to island people, property and infrastructure is a priority for the Environment Agency, but we’ll continue to have more dinosaur discoveries in mind.”
