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"It's very
unusual how long the trail is and what great condition it's in,"
excavation leader Benjamin Englich told Reuters at the site,
referring to 90 uninterrupted footprints stretching over 50
meters. Their diameter measured 1.2 meters.
Englich and his team found the impressions in the central German
region while excavating at the quarry in the town of
Rehburg-Loccum near Hanover on Wednesday.
Englich said the elephant-like tracks were stomped into the
ground sometime between 135 and 145 million years ago by a
sauropod - a class of heavy dinosaurs with long necks and tails.
"We don't have a complete skeleton for a dinosaur this big from
this time period," said Englich. "That means it's a species we
haven't seen before from this era."
The prehistoric prints are not only big, said Englich, but also
unusually deep. The impressions sink more than 40 centimeters
into the ground, suggesting they were made by a creature that
weighed up to 30 tonnes.
Experts hope the trail could help shed light on conditions in
the Cretaceous period, the mysterious era which ended 65 million
years ago with the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
The biggest dinosaur prints ever found, measuring up to two
meters in diameter, were discovered by amateur diggers in the
French Jura region in 2009.
(Editing by Erik Kirschbaum and Clelia Oziel)
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