Largest dinosaur foot ever found was a Brachiosaurus relative

Evidence of Bigfoot was found in The Black Hills region of the United States – not the mythical humanoid Bigfoot, but rather a dinosaur related to the giant plant-eating dinosaurs Brontosaurus and Diplodocus.

These were the largest land animals to ever live on our planet, so when a 1998 expedition from the University of Kansas excavated a giant foot fossil almost a meter wide, they aptly nicknamed the specimen “Bigfoot.”

After detailed preparation and study, Anthony Maltese – a member of that original expedition – and his international team of researchers have identified the largest dinosaur foot ever found as belonging to an animal very closely related to Brachiosaurus. You may remember these dinosaurs from the original 1993 Jurassic Park film.

The researchers used 3D scanning and detailed measurements to compare Bigfoot to the feet of numerous members of the sauropod family of dinosaurs. Analysis and comparisons with other sauropod feet found that Bigfoot was the largest dinosaur foot ever discovered.

Their findings also confirmed that brachiosaurs inhabited a large area from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming roughly 150 million years ago. “This is surprising”, says Emanuel Tschopp, a Swiss paleontologist working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, “many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time.”

Maltese – now at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado – states that the rock outcrops where they found this fossil hold many more “fantastic dinosaur skeletons,” and his research team plans to continue studying fossils from this region.

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By Connor Ertz, Earth.com Staff Writer

Image Credit: Davide Bonadonna, Milan, Italy

Full paper can be found here