Yemen yields Arabian Peninsula's 1st dinosaur footprints

BEIJING, May 21 (Xinhuanet) -- The Arabian Peninsula's first set of dinosaur footprints have been found in Yemen's ancient coastal mudflats.

The footprints provide evidence a herd of 11 gigantic dinosaurs - sauropods, the largest animals that ever walked on land - tramped deep tracks into the earth that have lasted roughly 150 million years.

Not far away are tracks of a lone ornithopod - a large, common vegetarian with birdlike, three-toed feet that walked on its hind legs, sometimes referred to as the "cow of the Mesozoic," said researcher Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands. The Mesozoic Era is also known as the Age of Dinosaurs,

"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map," Schulp said.

Fossil tracks allow scientists to discover critical details about dinosaurs. For instance, the fact that sauropods did not leave furrows from their tails with their footprints means these giants did not drag their lengthy tails behind them. Instead, they must have held them high off the ground, to help balance their bodies, given their equally long necks.

"We really want to learn when did which dinosaurs live where, and why was that?" Schulp said. "How did the distribution change over time, why did one replace another and move from one place to another?"

Although ornithopods and sauropods overlapped in time, it is a bit unusual to find evidence of such a big ornithopod in the late Jurassic, the epoch from which these fossils date, the researchers noted. Back then, the African and Arabian Peninsular land masses had not yet been separated by the Red Sea.

"These trackways help us to assemble a more detailed picture of what was happening on the southern landmasses. It's exciting to see new paleontological data coming out of Yemen, and I think there is a lot more to discover," said researcher Nancy Stevens, an Ohio University paleontologist. "This international collaboration provides an exciting new window into evolutionary history from a critically under sampled region."

(Agencies)