They found a giant Velociraptor footprint

An international team of researchers led by paleontologist Anthony Romelio (a member of the Dinosaur Laboratory of the University of… University of Queensland) Velociraptor traces found It will be about five meters long, a height that is completely out of the known size range of the species. The footprints were found in Fuyang Province, southeastern China. In fact, Romelio marvels when talking about the animal's size: “This creature is about 5 meters long and its legs are 1.8 meters long. Imagine something like this coming at you at full speed!”

Anthony Romelio points out that ““When people think of raptors, they probably think of the ones in the movies,” he said, referring to the “aggressive, muscular, human-sized hunters” of the Jurassic dinosaurs.. It's a fact that contradicts what the researchers found, because, as Romelio explains, “these footprints left a slender, more intelligent group of the Velociraptor family known as the Troodontids, which appeared at the end of the Jurassic period about 95 million years ago.” “.

Discovery changes things

These footprints are not new, as they were discovered in 2020 by a research team led by Lida Xing, an associate professor at the China University of Geosciences, which are dinosaur footprints that were reported in Fujian Province and they discovered several footprints that correspond to types of dinosaurs and that is why Sheng set out to investigate these findings.

Romelio explains that footprints found in these areas of Asia have been compared with other footprints from the entire continent, North America, South America and Europe. The paleontologist celebrates this discovery and explains: “We discovered that this type of monument has a different shape, which makes it completely unique. The concept of large troodontids has recently emerged in the paleontological community..

That's why the researcher points to a new trend: “The bones discovered in Alaska point to a trend toward gigantism near the ancient Arctic Circle, an area where there is likely to be less competition between species due to long periods of winter darkness.”