The first dinosaur tracks ever to be discovered in the Arabian Peninsula have been found in the bedrock of what is now Yemen. Made 150 million years ago, the two separate trackways were created by a herd of 11 sauropods and a lone two-legged plant-eating dinosaur belonging to the ornithopod family, reports the BBC News.
No one found the tracks until now because they were covered by rubble and debris. The area is not known for fossils, but this is quite a find that was discovered by a Yemeni journalist in the village of Madar north of the capital Sana'a. Dr. Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands, who visited Yemen to assist with the investigation, describes the tracks as "beautifully preserved."
She told the BBC, "The nice thing about the sauropod tracks is that we've got a herd of them, 11 individuals all walking in the same direction. It's actually a group consisting of different-sized animals, so we've got old ones, and we've got some younger dinosaurs as well, so different age-groups of dinosaurs were living together here."
Palaeontologist Dr. Paul Barrett of London's Natural History Museum told the BBC, "Dinosaur material is exceptionally rare in this part of the world, and is represented by only a handful of fragmentary fossils. As a result, we know virtually nothing about the animals that once roamed this area. This discovery shows that several different kinds of dinosaur were abundant in the region and starts to fill a large gap in our knowledge of what was going on in the Middle East during the age of the dinosaurs."
The findings were published in the journal PLoS One.
