Footprints of dinosaurs gave interesting clues about their gait

dinosaur skeleton at museum

We all must have watched Jurassic Park, a famous action science-fiction 1993 blockbuster film series but did we ever imagine and thought how this big four feet animal used to walk in real life before its extinction. It made me browse Wikipedia to get answers. There I found interesting facts about Sauropod - was actually a member of the Dinosaur subgroup Sauropoda that was living between 201 million and 66 million years ago, recognized by large size, long neck, and tail, a four-legged animal, herbivorous, walked like a “pace gait,” similar to giraffe, hitting left or right legs on the ground at once and considered one of the largest of all dinosaurs and land animals.

Scientists during their research compared big dinosaurs to semi-trucks because when they moved around, weighed as much as 70 tons, researchers while analyzing fossiled footprints, said that big four feet animals walked by keeping one foot down on each side during swinging their diagonal legs just like similar to today's beaver or a hedgehog while they move. But gaits of those dinosaurs were found different from elephants and giraffes.

dinosaur skeleton at museum

According to Cary Woodruff, a Sauropod paleontologist at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station, although the fossilized bones of dinosaurs disclose the shape of extinct animal bodies actually it was footprints that led to revealing about their behavior and locomotion. Another paleontologist Jens Lallensack said that it was not possible for a giant animal size of a dinosaur to walk around while shifting its gargantuan weight to each side because it could fall down while shifting weight of 30 to 40 tons. 

Therefore to get their answers, Jens Lallensack with fellow paleontologist Peter Falkingham decided to study the footprints of Sauropod discovered in southwestern Arkansas in 1989 and 2018. So they started measuring distances between each imprint so that correct identification of tracks could be found during movement of animal’s front or back and left or right foot and taken into account measuring different limb phases to know the time lag between forefeet and hindfeet and they also noted that the limb phase could be mapped onto a hypothetical Sauropod’s body by measuring its trunk, or the distance between its shoulders and hips but for each potential limb phase along the trackway, this trunk length might vary between sets of prints. They pointed out by saying that the dinosaur was not going to become longer or shorter when it moved around. 

While presenting their findings in Current Biology, they identified Sauropod walking gait as a “diagonal couplet” on a pattern because that big animal used to keep one foot down on each side and picked up diagonal limbs nearly in sync. 

When the researchers included live animal video walking of dogs, horses, camels, elephants, and even raccoon to test their method that was based on trackways, they found that their observations regarding correct gait positions produced the same result while compared with Sauropod. While concluding their results, the researchers said that Sauropod had a diagonal gait rather than a pacing gait.