Even large, predatory dinosaurs occasionally had to stop for a drink. Footprints found on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland suggest that both large predatory dinosaurs and their prey drank together from the edges of shallow freshwater lagoons 167 million years ago.
At the Kilmaluag Formation at Prince Charles’s Point on Skye’s Trotternish Peninsula, 131 dinosaur footprints have been found, making it one of Scotland’s largest and rarest sites like this. The footprints date back 167 million years to the Middle Jurassic. The Middle Jurassic fossil record is quite sparse so tracks like these can be a valuable resource for scientists to learn more about the behavior of these ancient beasts.
The footprints include large, flat, circular impressions that the team believe belonged to the long-necked, herbivorous sauropods. The researchers also found footprints that belong to megalosaurs, which are a rare find. Previously, the large, circular depressions were thought to be fish resting burrows, which suggests there may be other fish resting burrows that are similarly mistaken and are actually more dinosaur tracks.
By looking closer at the direction of the footprints and the gaits of these ancient giants, the team believe that the dinosaurs would have congregated at the edge of the lagoons. Of the 131 tracks, 65 were classified as theropods, 58 as sauropods, and eight as unidentified.
The team took thousands of photos with a drone to help understand more and build 3D models of the footprints using a method called photogrammetry. This reveals variations in the directions of the tracks, what the team call “milling behavior”, and suggests that the sauropods and theropods likely traveled along a shallow lagoon edge.
“The footprints at Prince Charles’s Point provide a fascinating insight into the behaviours and environmental distributions of meat-eating theropods and plant-eating, long-necked sauropods during an important time in their evolution. On Skye, these dinosaurs clearly preferred shallowly submerged lagoonal environments over subaerially exposed mudflats,” said Tone Blakesley, research lead and Masters in Palaeontology and Geobiology graduate from the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, in a statement.
Compared to other known trackways in Scotland, the Prince Charles’s Point is a standout for having a greater number of theropod tracks compared to sauropods, which may be linked to the freshwater nature of this site compared to the more brackish or saltwater environmental conditions at Rubha nam Bràithrean and Cairidh Ghlumaig. The world’s longest continuous dinosaur trackway was discovered in Colorado in 2024.
In more recent history, the area was the hiding place for Charles Edward Stuart, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Flora MacDonald in 1746 while being chased by British soldiers after the Battle of Culloden.
“Prince Charles’s Point is a place where Scottish history and prehistory blend together. It’s astounding to think that when Bonnie Prince Charlie was running for his life, he might have been sprinting in the footsteps of dinosaurs,” said Steve Brusatte, Personal Chair of Palaeontology and Evolution from the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh.
The paper is published in PLOS One.
