Was there a time when dinosaurs travelled across continents? Here's what new study says

Dinosaurs have long captured scientists’ and the public’s imagination.

In a latest fascinating discovery, an international team of scientists have found matching sets of footprints in Africa and South America, indicating that dinosaurs once travelled along a type of highway about 12 crore years ago before the two continents split apart.

Let’s take a closer look.

Dinosaurs tracks discovered

More than 260 dinosaur footprints have been found by palaeontologists in Brazil and Cameroon, which are currently located more than 6,000 kilometres apart on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Early Cretaceous period trackways provide a window into the environment of the Gondwana supercontinent during the dinosaur era.

Later, the landmass was divided into South America and Africa, each of which still contains fossils from distinct dinosaur species.

The footprints reveal details on the size and gait of these ancient animals, as well as their behaviour and the types of environments they lived in.

The study was published on Monday by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

According to CNN, lead author and Texas’ Southern Methodist University’s seasoned palaeontologist, Louis L Jacobs, first discovered the dinosaur tracks in Cameroon in the late 1980s.

He reported on them at the First International Symposium on Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, which was convened by palaeontologist Martin Lockley, in 1986.

According to Jacobs, who described the traces, there are dinosaur footprints across continents, suggesting that a large family of predators may have inhabited both Africa and the Americas.

“We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar. In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical,” Jacobs said, as per Wion News.

While most of the fossilised prints were created by three-toed theropod dinosaurs, some likely belonged to lumbering four-legged sauropods with long necks and tails or ornithischians, which had pelvic structures similar to birds, CNN quoted study co-author Diana P Vineyard, research associate at SMU.

Also read: A Jurrasic World: Do dinosaurs still exist?

The whole story

Africa and South America began to drift apart about 14 crore years ago.

Rifts in the Earth’s crust were caused by the separation, and the new oceanic crust was formed by magma in the Earth’s mantle as the tectonic plates beneath both continents moved apart.

The void separating the two continents was eventually filled in by the South Atlantic Ocean.

The dinosaur footprints were discovered in the northeastern Brazilian region of the Borborema and the northern Cameroonian Koum Basin, both of which showed evidence of those significant occurrences.

Both regions have half-graben basins, which are geologic formations created during rifting as the Earth’s crust splits and faults arise. These basins hold sediments from historic rivers and lakes, as per Phys.org.

According to Jacobs, the footprints were preserved in mud and silt along extinct rivers and lakes in Gondwana, which split off from the main Pangean landmass.

He also mentioned that, before the two continents gradually drifted apart, northern Brazil and Cameroon had constituted a small land bridge that allowed animals to cross between Africa and South America.

“One of the youngest and narrowest geological connections between Africa and South America was the elbow of northeastern Brazil, nestled against the present-day coast of Cameroon along the Gulf of Guinea, explained Jacobs, according to Wion.

“The two continents were continuous along that narrow stretch so that animals on either side of that connection could potentially move across it,” he added.

“The tracks tell us that these dinosaurs were moving through an environment that was changing drastically,” said Diana P Vineyard, who is a research associate at SMU and a co-contributor to the study.

“These regions, now so far apart, were once part of the same landscape, filled with rivers, lakes, and thriving ecosystems,” he added.

Proof of dinosaurs’ behaviour

While dinosaur fossils give unique insights into the kind of animals that walked on the Earth, their footprints offer further windows into their past behaviours.

“Dinosaur tracks are not rare, but unlike the bones usually found, footprints are the proof of dinosaur behaviour, how they walked, ran or otherwise, who they walked with, with what environment they walked through, what direction they were going, and where they were when they were doing it,” Jacobs said.

However, it is difficult to tell the specific species of dinosaurs that travelled along the basins.

With inputs from agencies