Although it's impossible to say for certain what kind of dinosaur made the tracks, said Costeur, the allosaur is a candidate, since it was common in the Cameros Basin in the early part of the Cretaceous — when the basin was a very large lake.
"The place is full of walking theropod dinosaur footprints," he said.
"It doesn't surprise me at all that theropod dinosaurs had the ability to swim," said dinosaur track specialist Brent Breithaupt, curator and director of the Geological Museum at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. "What does surprise me is that you'd find evidence of this."
And unlike some possible swimming dino tracks that Breithaupt has heard of here and there in the Rocky Mountains, the new discovery is more than a single track.
"It's wonderful that it is a track-way and not an individual track," Breithaupt told Discovery News. Without many tracks, it's impossible to sort out what the creature was doing.
The Lake Cameros swimming track is so good, said Breithaupt, that it could very well serve as an archetype for paleontologists looking for such tracks elsewhere.
