An 8-year-old boy found a pair of 160-million-year-old dinosaur tracks on the beach near his home in England, it was reported.
Rhys Nichols was walking with his father on the beach near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, when he saw the intact 9-inch footprints on a rock, the Daily Mail reported.
"His only disappointment is that they are prints from a plant-eating dinosaur. He would rather they had been from one of the big meat-eating ones like a Tyrannosaurus Rex because they are his favorite," the boy's mother said.
Experts reportedly said the prints likely belong to an herbivorous iguanodon animal that roamed during the Jurassic period.
"This is a great find as dinosaur prints are not normally that clear," archaeologist Will Watts said, "Looking at the size of the prints, the dinosaur was probably the same size as Rhys."
Copyright 2008 by United Press International
Related stories:
Scientists find first dinosaur tracks on Arabian Peninsula
Scientists have discovered the first dinosaur tracks on the Arabian Peninsula. In the May 21 issue of the journal
PLoS ONE, they report evidence of a large ornithopod dinosaur, as well as a herd of 11 sauropods walking along a Mesozoic coastal mudflat in what is now the Republic of Yemen.
How to look at dinosaur tracks
A new study appearing in the May issue of
The Journal of Geology provides fascinating insight into the factors geologists must account for when examining dinosaur tracks. The authors studied a range of larger tracks from the family of dinosaurs that includes the T. Rex and the tridactyl, and provide a guide for interpreting the effects of many different types of erosion on these invaluable impressions.
Elephant legs are much bendier than Shakespeare thought
Throughout history, elephants have been thought of as 'different'. Shakespeare, and even Aristotle, described them as walking on inflexible column-like legs. And this myth persists even today. Which made John Hutchinson from The Royal Veterinary College, London, want to find out more about elephants and the way they move. Are they really that different from other, more fleet-footed species? Are their legs as rigid and 'columnar' as people had thought? Traveling to Thailand and several UK zoos, Hutchinson and his team investigated how Asian Elephants move their legs as they walk and run and publishes his results in
The Journal of Experimental Biology.
Duck-billed dinosaurs outgrew predators to survive
With long limbs and a soft body, the duck-billed hadrosaur had few defenses against predators such as tyrannosaurs. But new research on the bones of this plant-eating dinosaur suggests that it had at least one advantage: It grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, giving it superiority in size.
Protection built to scale -- fish scale, that is
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists seeking to protect the soldier of the future can learn a lot from a relic of the past, according to an MIT study of a primitive fish that could point to more effective ways of designing human body armor.
Giant flying reptiles preferred to walk
New research into gigantic flying reptiles has found that they weren’t all gull-like predators grabbing fish from the water but that some were strongly adapted for life on the ground.
Researchers find dinosaur clues in fat
A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A paper published April 21, 2008 in the online peer-reviewed journal
BMC Biology contains the surprising implication that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.
New meat-eating dinosaur duo from Sahara ate like hyenas, sharks
Two new 110 million-year-old dinosaurs unearthed in the Sahara Desert highlight the unusual meat-eaters that prowled southern continents during the Cretaceous Period. Named Kryptops and Eocarcharia in a paper appearing this month in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the fossils were discovered in 2000 on an expedition led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno.