Around 50 newly identified footprints on the Isle of Skye have helped scientists confirm that stegosaurs – with their distinctive diamond-shaped back plates – roamed there around 170 million year ago.
The site on the island’s north-east coast – which was at the time a mudflat on the edge of a shallow lagoon on a long-lost island in the Atlantic – contains a mixture of footprints, and reveals that dinosaurs on Skye were more diverse than previously thought.
A team of palaeontologists from the University of Edinburgh discovered a short sequence of distinctive, oval footprints and handprints belonging to a stegosaur, left by a young animal or a small-bodied member of the stegosaur family as it ambled across the mudflat.
The discovery means that the site at Brothers’ Point – called Rubha nam Brathairean in Gaelic – is now recognised as one of the oldest-known fossil records of this major dinosaur group found anywhere in the world.
Large stegosaurs could grow to almost 30 feet long and weigh more than six tonnes.
Skye is one of the few places in the world were fossils from the Middle Jurassic period can be found.
Discoveries on the island have provided scientists with vital clues about the early evolution of major dinosaur groups, including huge, long-necked sauropods and fierce, meat-eating cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex.
