Was there a time when dinosaurs crossed continents? New study says – Firstpost

Dinosaurs have always captured the imagination of scientists and the public.

An international team of researchers has found matching footprints in Africa and South America, indicating that dinosaurs traveled on a kind of highway around 1.2 million years ago, before the two continents broke apart.

Let’s take a closer look.

Dinosaur tracks discovered

More than 260 dinosaur footprints have been discovered by paleontologists in Brazil and Cameroon. The two countries are currently more than 6,000 kilometers apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Early Cretaceous tracks provide insight into the environment of the supercontinent Gondwana during the dinosaur era.

The landmass was later divided into South America and Africa, both of which still contain fossils of different dinosaur species.

The footprints reveal details about the size and gait of these prehistoric animals, as well as their behavior and the type of environment in which they lived.

The study was published Monday by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

Accordingly CNNLead author and experienced paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs of Southern Methodist University in Texas first discovered the dinosaur tracks in Cameroon in the late 1980s.

He reported on this at the first international symposium on dinosaur tracks and traces, convened by paleontologist Martin Lockley in 1986.

According to Jacobs, who described the tracks, dinosaur footprints are found on every continent, suggesting that both Africa and the Americas may have been inhabited by a large family of predators.

“We found that these footprints are similar in age. They were also similar in their geological and plate tectonic context. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical,” Jacobs said, according to Wion News.

While most of the fossilized prints come from three-toed theropod dinosaurs, some probably belonged to lumbering four-legged sauropods with long necks and tails, or to ornithischians whose pelvic structures resembled those of birds. CNN quoted study co-author Diana P. Vineyard, research associate at SMU.

Read also: A Jurassic world: Are there still dinosaurs?

The whole story

Africa and South America began to drift apart about 140 million years ago.

The separation created cracks in the Earth’s crust, and the new oceanic crust was formed by magma in the Earth’s mantle as the tectonic plates beneath the two continents moved apart.

The gap between the two continents was eventually filled by the South Atlantic.

The dinosaur footprints were discovered in the northeastern Brazilian region of Borborema and in the northern Cameroonian Koum Basin, both providing evidence of these important deposits.

Both regions have half-graben basins, geological formations that were created during rifting, when the Earth’s crust split and faults formed. These basins contain sediments from historic rivers and lakes, such as Phys.org.

According to Jacobs, the footprints were preserved in mud and silt along dried-up rivers and lakes in Gondwana, which had split off from the main landmass of Pangaea.

He also mentioned that northern Brazil and Cameroon formed a small land bridge that allowed animals to move between Africa and South America before the two continents gradually drifted apart.

“One of the most recent and closest geological connections between Africa and South America was the elbow in northeastern Brazil, which hugged the present-day coast of Cameroon on the Gulf of Guinea,” Jacobs explained, according to Wion.

“The two continents were continuous along this narrow strip, so animals on both sides of this connection could potentially cross it,” he added.

“The tracks show us that these dinosaurs moved through an environment that was changing dramatically,” said Diana P. Vineyard, a research associate at SMU and co-author of the study.

“These regions, now so far apart, were once part of the same landscape full of rivers, lakes and thriving ecosystems,” he added.

Evidence of dinosaur behavior

While dinosaur fossils provide unique insights into the types of animals that once walked the Earth, their footprints offer further insight into their past behavior.

“Dinosaur tracks are not rare, but unlike the bones commonly found, footprints are evidence of dinosaur behavior: how they walked, ran or whatever, who they walked with, what environment they walked through, what direction they went and where they were when they did so,” Jacobs said.

However, it is difficult to determine the exact dinosaur species that traversed these basins.

With contributions from agencies