Dinosaur footprints on both sides of the Atlantic are identical sets.

A team of paleontologists has identified more than 260 dinosaur footprints in South America and Africa that match each other, clearly showing how the continents were once connected.

The footprints were about the same age, about 120 million years old, and had been pressed into mud and silt on ancient riverbanks and lakeshores. Most of the prints—also known as trace fossils, because they are just the traces of the animals that made them—were created by theropods, a group of two-legged, three-toed carnivorous dinosaurs. Some of the most famous dinosaurs included in the groups were theropods such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and AllosaurusOther tracks included hundreds of prints belonging to large dinosaurs (such as large dinosaurs such as large dinosaurs such as large dinosaurs such as large dinosaurs). Brontosaurus) and the avian dinosaurs, which were so named because of their hip bones, which resembled those of birds.

The tracks were found on land that is now part of Brazil and Cameroon, two countries separated by more than 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) of ocean. At the time, the land was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The tracks in Brazil were found in the Cusa Basin, an area in eastern Brazil that fits perfectly along the African coast along the Gulf of Guinea, which many of us were excited to discover as children. The tracks in Brazil are more than 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away from the tracks in Cameroon, but they show that groups of dinosaurs roamed across the two countries when they were still connected.

“One of the smallest and narrowest geological connections between Africa and South America was the elbow of northeastern Brazil off the coast of what is now Cameroon along the Gulf of Guinea,” said Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University and lead author of the study, in a study published in the journal Nature Community. Southern Methodist University Launches“The two continents were connected along this narrow stretch, so that animals on either side of this connection could move across it.” Gizmodo was unable to access a copy of the 1998 paper. by New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

Trace fossils often reveal details about dinosaur life that can’t be learned from fossilized animal bones. Trace fossils aren’t just footprints; they can be droppings, nests, and other remnants of dinosaurs’ relationship to their environment. In 2021, a different team of paleontologists calculated the speed of a dinosaur based on the footprints it left behind and found that the animals could move at nearly 28 miles per hour, nearly as fast as the fastest humans in the world.

It’s strange to think that these ancient beasts once roamed freely across lands now separated by oceans. These footprints seem like echoes of a time when the world’s land masses were more closely interconnected and dinosaurs were the undisputed rulers of the Earth.