A stone used as a stepping stone in a family's yard in China for decades has been confirmed as a 190-million-year-old dinosaur footprint fossil.
According to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post on the 4th, the Ding brothers living in Sichuan Province, China, discovered a flat stone with markings resembling "chicken footprints" during quarrying work in 1998. Without giving it much thought, they used these stones as stepping stones in front of their house. Zigong City in Sichuan Province is known as the "hometown of Chinese dinosaurs." In the 1970s and 1980s, over 200 dinosaur and vertebrate fossils, including pterosaurs and dinosaur skin, were discovered at the Dashanpu Middle Jurassic dinosaur fossil excavation site in Zigong, and a dinosaur museum was built on the site.
In 2017, as local residents' interest in dinosaurs grew, the daughter of one of the Ding brothers posted photos of the flat stones online. The photos clearly showed sharp claw marks, round footprints, and linear traces, which caught the attention of researchers at the dinosaur museum. A month later, researchers confirmed that these stones were dinosaur footprint fossils. With the Ding family's consent, the fossil specimens were transferred to the museum.
Recently, Chinese scientists published their research findings on these fossils in the international academic journal Historical Biology. The study examined 413 footprints imprinted on eight stone slabs, which were confirmed to date back approximately 180 to 190 million years to the Early Jurassic period. Scientists stated that most of these footprints belong to dinosaur species called Grallator and Eubrontes. The researchers estimated that these dinosaurs used a "ground-running" locomotion method similar to modern birds and moved at speeds of 5.8 to 8.6 kilometers per hour. The researchers also discovered rare tail-drag marks on the stones. This discovery has become a major topic of discussion on Chinese social media.
