More than 100 dinosaur tracks left behind in modern-day Scotland about 167 million years ago reveal a tantalising glimpse of life during the Middle Jurassic.
Palaeontologists have identified up to 131 footprints in rocks on the Isle of Skye, the largest and northern-most island in the Inner Hebrides archipelago of Scotland’s west coast. The tracks are described in a paper published in the journal PLOS One.
Diagram showing three fossil dinosaur tracks
Digital representations of selected tracks. Credit: Blakesley et al., 2025, PLOS One (CC-BY 4.0)
They were discovered by a research team led by University of Edinburgh graduate student Tone Blakesly between 2019 and 2024.
The footprints were left in the rippled sands of an ancient tropical lagoon and range from 25 to 60cm in length. They date to the middle of the Jurassic period which lasted 201 to 145 million years ago.
Jurassic Europe was a group of tropical and subtropical islands.
The footprints come in 2 different types. A type of 3-toed, carnivorous theropod dinosaur was responsible for 65 of the tracks. Larger, round tracks belonging to long-necked, herbivorous sauropods left 58 footprints. Another 8 tracks are unidentified.
The carnivores are likely a large theropod similar to Megalosaurus or Eustreptospondylus. These Middle Jurassic meat-eaters would have been about 6m long and weighed 500kg. Some Megalosaurus might even have grown to 9m.
Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur to be named in 1824. In fact, it was named before the term “dinosaur” was even coined in 1842.
A possible sauropod which might have created the round Isle of Skye tracks is Cetiosaurus – a herbivore which grew to about 16m in length and 11 tonnes.
There are other examples of Jurassic sauropods in ancient Scottish lagoons. But the new trackways are notable for their high number of theropod footprints, and absence of other dinosaur types like plant-eating stegosaurs and ornithopods.
Many of the footprints occur in sequential steps. The longest trackways are more than 12m. The spacing and orientation between each step suggests slow walking with no consistent direction or interaction between the animals that left them.
Painting of theropod dinosaur and sauropod leaving footprints in ripple sand
An artistic reconstruction of the tracksite in the Middle Jurassic. Credit: Tone Blakesley and Scott Reid.
Most likely, the dinosaurs were casually milling about at slightly different times.
“The footprints at Prince Charles’s Point provide 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,” the paper authors write.
The footprints were discovered at Prince Charles’s Point on the island’s northern Trotternish Peninsula. The point is significant in British history as the place where Charles Edward Stuart – also known as “the Young Pretender” and “Bonnie Prince Charlie” – took shelter in 1746.
Charles was the leader of the unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion and the last serious claimant to the British throne from the House of Stuart.
Unbeknown to the Young Pretender as he hid from the English government forces, Charlie was following in the footsteps of Jurassic giants.
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