A high-traffic “dinosaur freeway” may have once stretched across a shoreline in what is now Bolivia. Traveling along this busy route were theropods — three-toed, bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs, which left behind thousands of fossil footprints. Paleontologists have now described their tracks for the first time, offering a rare glimpse into dinosaurs’ movements through their habitat.Scientists recently counted 16,600 theropod tracks — more than any other trackway site — at the Carreras Pampas tracksite in Bolivia’s Torotoro National Park. There the theropods stamped their feet into the soft, deep mud between 101 million and 66 million years ago, toward the end of the Cretaceous period.This study is the first scientific survey of the footprint-covered areas, which extend roughly 80,570 square feet (7,485 square meters). Some tracks were isolated, but many formed trackways, or multiple impressions left by the same animal, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“Everywhere you look on that rock layer at the site, there are dinosaur tracks,” said study coauthor Dr. Jeremy McLarty, an associate professor of biology and director of the Dinosaur Science Museum and Research Center at Southwestern Adventist University in Texas.Most of the tracks were traveling north-northwest or southeast, McLarty told CNN. They were likely made over a relatively short time span, indicating that this area was a popular thoroughfare for theropods and could have been part of a larger dinosaur freeway that spans Argentina, Bolivia and Peru.Print shapes and the distance between the footprints revealed how the animals were moving; some strolled at a leisurely pace, while others sprinted through the muddy shoreline, and more than 1,300 tracks preserved evidence of swimming in shallow water, the researchers reported.Several trackways inclu …
