Hadrosaur Footprint
Part of Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation.
Alvaro Keding/© AMNH
A hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, likely made this impression 83–72 million years ago in Utah. The long, dragging heel of the footprint indicates that the dinosaur probably made it while pulling its foot out of sucking mud.
Trace fossils like this one are the remains of an organism’s activity. They include such things as burrows, fossilized poop, called coprolite, and footprints like this one, discovered in 1938. While fossilized bones provide important information, trace fossils are crucial for understanding how extinct animals lived and behaved. For example, scientists use the distance between footprints to calculate how fast the animals moved.
Among trace fossils, footprints are exceedingly rare. The Museum’s dinosaur collection—formally the collection of fossil amphibians, reptiles, and birds—is the largest in the world, with over 30,000 specimens. Only 48 are footprints—a testament to how difficult they are to collect.
