By Charles Q. Choi

May 22, FoxNews


For the first time, dinosaur footprints have been found on the Arabian Peninsula.

In ancient coastal mudflats in Yemen, fossils reveal that a herd of 11 gigantic dinosaurs — sauropods, the largest animals that ever walked on land — tramped deep tracks into the earth that have lasted roughly 150 million years.

Nearby, there are tracks of a lone ornithopod — a large, common vegetarian with bird-like, three-toed feet that walked on its hind legs, sometimes referred to as the "cow of the Mesozoic," or Age of Dinosaurs, said researcher Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands.

Blank spot

Altogether, these new tracks help shed the most light to date on the mysterious history of dinosaurs in the Arabian Peninsula.

Only a few dinosaur fossils have been reported so far from the Arabian Peninsula — isolated bones from the Sultanate of Oman and possible fragments of a sauropod from the Republic of Yemen.

"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map," Schulp said.

And "big dinosaurs don't live alone," Schulp told LiveScience. "I'm sure there were some carnivorous dinosaurs around as well, as well as much smaller animals, not only dinosaurs."

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photo: An ornithopod trackway in ancient coastal mudflats in Yemen (By Nancy Stevens)