Locomotion
Part of the The World's Largest Dinosaurs exhibition.
Part of the The World's Largest Dinosaurs exhibition.
As amazing as it seems, we have footprints of sauropods on nearly every continent, left during their 140-million-year stint on Earth. And those footprints, many in long trackways, provide some of the best data on the animals' daily life. With them, scientists can tackle such questions as: How fast could these animals walk? Did they travel in groups? Did young and old move together?
Experts use footprints to estimate speed by measuring the length of a stride, which is the distance between two consecutive prints of the same foot. Of course, stride length is a product of leg length as well as speed. By combining evidence from trackways with estimates of leg length, experts have concluded that sauropods might have moved at the pace of a slow human jogger.
Trackways suggest that some sauropods--possibly including Mamenchisaurus--traveled in small, mixed-age groups. Footprints can't be assigned to species, so it's hard to know for sure.
Scientists recently uncovered over 40 sets of dinosaur trackways in a British limestone quarry; one set can be seen in this photo. These trackways, one nearly 650 feet (200 meters) long, seem to record a single event: a large group of dinosaurs moving in the same direction across a mudflat. The group included both adults and juveniles traveling together. Two different types of sauropods, as well as a two-legged meat-eating dinosaur, are represented.