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| Thursday, 29 August, 2002, 10:16 GMT 11:16 UK 'I hunt dinosaurs' ![]() The prints are the biggest found in Scotland When a woman walking her dog chanced upon a dinosaur footprint, she and her amateur fossil hunter husband turned to palaeontologist Neil Clark. Here he tells of seeking dinosaur remains on the Isle of Skye - the UK's Jurassic Island.
Back then what we now call Scotland would have been attached to North America and Greenland - and oddly enough, few remains have been found in North America, so we have the best examples of North American dinosaurs in Scotland. It wouldn't have been the rugged landscape of today; it would have been a very flat area, perhaps a bit like southern France, with lagoons dotted about. The dinosaurs that made the footprints we found would have been strolling about, maybe going for a drink of water at a lake. Lost world My first dinosaur find was in the early 1990s, when a large bone was found on the island. It turned out to be the thigh bone of a sauropod, a large plant-eating dinosaur that looked a bit like an elephant.
So chasing dinosaurs can be dangerous.
And it is the dream of all palaeontologists to go back in time and have a look at how these animals lived - except I'd like to do it from the comfort of a capsule to protect me from the environment. I don't fancy being chased by the meat-eating megalosarous that left the tracks we found in Skye. Much excitement There are only a handful of sites worldwide where you find Middle Jurassic dinosaur remains, so the footprints we unveiled this week are quite a rare find.
The first few days were mainly digging sand away from the tracks themselves, as the beach has moved in the months since we found them. We've only uncovered three of the 15 so far - it's probably better to wait until winter comes along so one of Skye's wonderful storms can remove all the sand.
Everyone we've invited onto the beach seems to be quite impressed. After all, it's quite something to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs, to see how large the prints are compared to your own feet. |
See also: 27 Aug 02 | Scotland Internet links: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top UK stories now: Links to more UK stories are at the foot of the page. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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