A 10-Year-Old Girl Went for a Walk on the Beach—and Stumbled Upon 5 Dinosaur Footprints

When 10-year-old Tegan and her mom, Claire, took a summer holiday stroll along a Welsh beach, she was likely hoping to find a neat seashell or two. Instead, she found something much better and much bigger.

• A 10-year-old girl out on a shoreline stroll on a Wales beach literally stumbled upon five prehistoric dinosaur footprints.
• Experts believes the footprints come from the camelotia dinosaur, a lesser-known herbivore from the late Triassic period.
• The massive footprints are spaced about 30 inches apart in a consistent pattern that indicates they were likely left behind by a dino.

The mother-daughter pair traveled to near the Vale of Glamorgan on the South Wales coast, which has become known as a bit of a hotspot for prehistoric finds. Still, it was quite a surprise when Tegan found a set of five massive footprints, each spaced about 30 inches from the other.

“It was so cool and exciting,” Tegan told the BBC. “We were just out looking to see what we could find. We didn’t think we’d find anything. We found these were big holes that looked like dinosaur footprints, so mum took some pictures, emailed the museum and it was from a long-necked dinosaur.”

Claire emailed the National Museum Wales, where Cindy Howells is the paleontology curator. “These footprints are so big,” Howells told the BBC’s The Dinohunters program, “it would have to be a type of dinosaur called a sauropodomorpha.”

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More specifically, experts believe the type of sauropodomorpha was a camelotia, a herbivore from the late Triassic period. A distinctive dinosaur known for its long neck, big body, long tail, and a small head, the dinosaur, which probably stood about 10 feet tall and measured 16 feet long, is believed to have occasionally walked only on its hind legs and at other times use all four feet to walk.

The red siltstone at Lavernock Point between Cardiff and Barry is known to contain prehistoric fossils. Dinosaur footprints have been found over the past century, and in 2014, on the same beach near the newly found footprints, two brothers discovered a full skeleton of a dracoraptor.

“It’s amazing as up until recently, we had so few dinosaur finds in Wales we didn’t think we had much in the way of dinosaurs here,” Howells said. “Now we’re getting a footprint or bone find every five to six years and we now know we’ve a continuous sequence of dinosaurs living in Wales over 15 million years or so. It’s amazing.”

The first clue that the new find was a dino was the lack of randomness in the pattern. Howells said there was a consistent distance between the five prints, with what appeared to be a left foot, followed by a right foot, then a left, and another right.

“It’s quite a significant find—the buzz you get when someone contacts us with a definite dinosaur find,” Howells said, “it’s amazing.”

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For Tegan and Claire, the beach walk turned into a better fossil hunt than most could have imagined. “It’s hard to comprehend you’re walking on the same beach that hundreds of millions of years ago some massive prehistoric animal was here,” Claire said. “You can spend a lifetime looking for dinosaur treasures so for it to happen for Tegan at this age is great.”