Large dinosaur tracks found high in the Alps

Researchers working high in the Alps of canton Graubünden have uncovered the highest and largest dinosaur tracks of their kind, a find 205-210 million years old.

A team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum in Basel found last week the footprints of a predatory dinosaur at 3,300 metres in Ela Nature Reserve, Switzerland’s largest park.

Basel museum officials said on Saturday that the tracks also represent the largest known specimens from the time period. The prints are 40cm long and most likely came from a three-toed carnivore that measured 4.5- to seven-metres long.

The tracks were not originally laid at such heights. At the time, the now-mountainous region of eastern Switzerland was a flat, tropical seashore.

Geological forces over millions of years folded the land into the Alps and took the tracks with them.

The Jura mountains on the opposite side of the country have yielded thousands of fossilised dinosaur tracks in the past, but the rolling chain of peaks is considerably lower than the Alps.

swissinfo.ch and agencies