135-Million-Year-Old Footprints Reveal New Dinosaur Species

SciNews has a story about a new dinosaur species.  The animal, Farlowichnus rapidus, lived about 135 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.  The name Farlowichnus was selected to honor Professor James Farlow, a paleontologist and ichnologist at Purdue University in Indiana.  Footprints were found in the Botucatu Formation just outside Sao Paulo, Brazil.  The research was published in the journal Cretaceous Research.  

r. Leonardi and co-authors discovered numerous footprints of the new theropod dinosaur in the Botucatu Formation near Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“The sandstones of the Botucatu Formation originally covered a surface estimated in at least 1.3 million km2, the largest known fossil desert in the Earth’s history,” the paleontologists said.

“The distribution area of the Botucatu paleodesert presents one of the world’s largest megatracksites.”

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