Globe-Trotting Dino? Tracks Present Mystery

June, 01, 2009 -- It's a Jurassic curiosity: As far as anyone can tell, the fossilized, three-toed dinosaur tracks in north-central Wyoming and on Scotland's coast are indistinguishable.

Even after painstaking measurements and statistical analysis, University of Glasgow paleontologist Neil Clark can't identify any differences between the two sets of 170 million-year-old tracks.

Watch a video about how one tracker finds dinosaur footprint fossils.

"The fact that the footprints in Wyoming and the ones in Scotland are so similar suggest that they may have been produced by a very similar kind of dinosaur, if not the same species," he said during a recent phone interview from his home in Glasgow, Scotland.

If the same dinosaur species made the tracks, the discovery would be as earthshaking as a mighty apatosaurus. No one has ever been able to say for certain that the same dinosaur species was responsible for fossil tracks discovered at separate locations, much less thousands of miles apart.

Now, American scientists are preparing to scrutinize the tracks further. They will use three-dimensional mapping technology that is revolutionizing the study of dinosaur tracks -- and promises to enable scientists to make detailed, intercontinental comparisons without leaving their offices.

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"What we hope will eventually happen is that there will be this huge virtual archive that can be shared worldwide," said Brent Breithaupt, a University of Wyoming paleontologist and head of the school's Geological Museum. "Tracks can be looked at in three dimensions on computer screens and can be rotated around by various researchers -- and can be compared."

Breithaupt doubts the same dinosaur species made the Wyoming and Scotland tracks.

"The tracks are similar, that's what we know," Breithaupt said. "It more than likely indicates similar types of dinosaurs living at higher latitudes at some point in time."

But he's more than happy to make comparisons.

For one thing, precious little is known about dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic epoch, when dinosaurs cemented what would be a very long reign on Earth -- and when both sets of tracks were made. Scientists have documented very few fossil dinosaur bones from that epoch in North America, making the handful of track sites in the American West valuable for understanding it.