The world's largest dinosaur footprint has been uncovered in the Mongolian desert. Nearly the size of a full grown man, the footprint is said to belong to the Titanosaur, which lived on earth approximately 70 to 90 million years ago.
This discovery was made by a group of researchers from Japan and Mongolia at the Gobi Desert. The Okayama University of Science has been involved in the study along with the Mongolian Academy of Science. Most of the discoveries on dinosaur footprints were made in the Mongolian dessert. Yet, this fossil discovery of the Titanosaur is their biggest to date.
"This is a very rare discovery as it's a well-preserved fossil footprint that is more than a metre long with imprints of its claws," reads the statement issued by the Okayama University of Science.
The Titanosaur footprint measures 20 meters tall and 30 meters long. Named after the mythological deities of ancient Greece, the Titans, Titanosaur means "titanic lizard." It belongs to the species of dinosaurs called sauropods which was first described in 1877 by Lydekker.
Known as herbivores, Titanosaurs are known to have the longest neck among all the dinosaur species that inhabited the earth. The babies of these dinosaurs weighted 3 to 4 kg at the time of birth, but research claims these species grew swiftly in weeks with a weight amounting to 30kgs. It takes around 20 years for a Titanosaur baby to develop into a full grown dinosaur.
Other similar-sized dinosaur footprints have been uncovered in France and Morocco, which clearly reveal the nails of the dinosaurs. This discovery could help researchers understand how dinosaurs walked.
On the other hand, Russian scientists have uncovered a yet unidentified fossil remains from the Kemerovo region of Siberia. Head of the Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems at the Tomsk State University, Sergei Leschchinsky further adds that they have yet to categorize the finding as a reptile or dinosaur.