10-year-old girl discovers 220-million-year-old dinosaur footprints on the beach
News Mania Desk/ Sohom Chatterjee / 7th September 2024
Tegan Jones of Wales, along with her mother Claire Jones, found a set of 220-million-year-old tracks of dinosaur footprints at the beach near Penarth. The mother-daughter duo were in search of some fossils last year in that part of South Wales, which is famously known for the existence of fossils from the Jurassic period when they discovered the footprint trail.
At first, they thought that those were already discovered and did not bother much about the findings. However, upon returning to their home which is about an hour ago from the beach, when they looked up images of footprints in that area online, they found their discovery to be not documented. The tracks were on red rocks compared to the pictures online which were predominantly on greyish rocks.
Claire joyfully said, “It was amazing to think that we had discovered something from 220 million years ago.” They contacted the National Museum Wales and Cindy Howells, the museum’s curator of palaeontology, joined the Joneses at the site to confirm their find and determine what type of dinosaur the prints belonged to.
Howells thinks that the footprints belong to a Camelotia dinosaur by the looks of the prints which are spaced apart by about 30 inches, the bones of the species have turned up in southwest England. “Unless you find actual fossil bones at the end of a trackway you can never be sure,” Howells said.
“These footprints are actually quite rare,” she added. However, the Joneses might not be the first people to spot them. Howells suspects that Geologists in the late 19th century published a paper on a series of tracks in a similar location, which was the same set that the Joneses came upon. “No one has seen them since,” she said.
An episode of the BBC show “Our Lives” featured the family and their discovery. Commenting about the whole incident, Claire Jones said, “It has been very surreal, amazing, and unbelievable.”
