Tourist guide Grover Marquina found one of the largest dinosaur footprints ever earlier this month 64 kilometers away from the city of Sucre in central Bolivia. The footprint, about 1.2 meters across, belonged to a meat-eating biped giant that lived 80 million years ago, called abelisaurus.
“This print is bigger than any other we have found to date in the area,” explains Sebastian Apesteguia, an Argentine palaeontologist who is assessing the footprint. “It is a record in size for carnivorous dinosaurs from the end of the Cretaceous period in South America.”
The footprint was found in an area known as the Maragua Zone. It is a place composed of soft clay and is actually famous for having dinosaur tracks and fossils.
— Federico Kukso (@fedkukso) July 25, 2016
Abelisaurus used to roam in South America. Its footprint is also a record size for carnivorous dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous period in the area.
Abelisaurus was first discovered in 1985 by Argentine paleontologists José F Bonaparte and Fernando E Novas. The palaeontologists concluded that it was not a relative of the famed Tyrannosaurus but belonged to a new species of dinosaurs.
Another team found a skull belonging to this dinosaur but experts still could not estimate its exact size. The discovery of its footprint will bring more insight about it and may help experts determine how big it got.
This is not the only dinosaur remain recently found. Another dinosaur remain was also discovered by an international team of scientists in northeastern Myanmar (Burma). The team found a pair of 99 million-year-old wings of an enantiornithine bird well-preserved in an amber.
Recently, another team of researchers found that dinosaurs did not roar like what we see in films. Instead, they actually cooed like birds.
Dinosaurs produced closed-mouth vocalizations just like some birds today. The findings are now available online in the journal Evolution.