A team of palaeontologists have found matching dinosaur tracks in Brazil and Cameroon, two countries that are separated by around 3,700 miles of open ocean.
More than 260 footprints were discovered by the researchers, who say that the tracks belong to a type of Early Cretaceous dinosaur.
The find pinpoints where land-living dinosaurs were last able to cross between Africa and South America before the continents started to split around 140 million years ago.
Analysis of the tracks revealed that they are similar in terms of age and geological context, and almost identical in their shape.
The majority of the fossilised footprints were created by theropods – three-toe dinosaurs with hollow bones and claws on each limb – while a few were likely made by enormous, long-necked sauropods and bird-like herbivorous ornithischians, says Diana P. Vineyard, research associate at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas and co-author of the study.
The footprints, impressed on top of thin sandstone strata interbedded with silt and mud, were made 120 million years ago on a single supercontinent known as Gondwana, explains Louis L. Jacobs, a palaeontologist from SMU and lead author of the study.
"One of the youngest and narrowest geological connections between Africa and South America was the elbow of northeastern Brazil nestled against what is now the coast of Cameroon along the Gulf of Guinea," says Jacobs.
"The two continents were continuous along that narrow stretch, so that animals on either side of that connection could potentially move across it."
The study was published by New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in a tribute to the late palaeontologist Martin Lockley, who spent much of his career studying dinosaurs tracks and footprints.
Main image credit: dinosaur footprints preserved in an ancient riverbed within the Sousa Basin in Brazil. Credit: Ismar de Souza Carvalho
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