Dinosaurs were traveling between Africa and Europe on foot

Little Mohamed Western

The footprints of dinosaurs found in many European countries, much like those found in Morocco, suggest that these creatures traveled between the two continents through a shallow sea that separated them more than 145 million years ago.

In that era of distant history, at the end of the Jurassic period, the continents of the world were not in a position as we know it today. Parts of Asia comprised Europe and North America, located in the south of the archipelago on the Iberian Peninsula along another continent called Gondwana, which includes Africa, South America and Australia.

Effects everywhere
Scientists believe that large predators have settled different parts of these lands, after their traces were found on different continents; for example, traces of dinosaurs "Allosaurus" and "Stegosaurus" (stegosaurs) and bones in all of North America And Portugal, suggesting that both regions were connected in some way.

In a new study, published in the Journal of African Earth Sciences in October, a team of European scientists identified two types of dinosaur footprints associated with large Jurassic predators in today's Switzerland, Portugal, Spain (which belongs to Lorasia) and Morocco (which was in Gondwana).

According to the scientists, these signs are due to carnivorous dinosaurs running on two legs resembling the dinosaur "Tyrannosaurus Rex".

"On the one hand, we identified footprints of large and slender feet of 30 to 50 centimeters, and on the other hand, giant and powerful footprints of more than 50 centimeters," said Diego Castanera of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​who is involved in the study.

To distinguish between types of footprints, the team used new software that actually helped scientists compare fossilized footprints. "We cannot say with certainty what animal left a certain step because the various related dinosaurs can have very similar effects," says Castanera.

However, this study confirms that the differences between the two fingerprint groups identified are important enough to say that they belong to two different types of dinosaurs, but are closely related to each other.

Shallow water trails
Scientists believe that the traces they found are probably due to two dinosaurs that lived around the same time: the nine-meter-long, 2.5-ton allosaurus, and the ten-meter, four-to-five-meter Torvosaurus. Tons.

The remains of these dinosaur bones have already been found in Portugal, indicating the existence of two super predators in terrestrial ecosystems from the late Jurassic.

To corroborate these data, the researchers say more studies are needed, especially to answer the question of how dinosaurs travel between the Lurasia and Gondwana continents. But the Spanish researcher expects the answer to raise new scientific problems "because geological studies indicate a deep sea between the two continents."

The researchers say that the presence of the same species in such distant places leads scientists to propose the theory of the spread of dinosaurs between continents during the Middle Ages, the era in which dinosaurs lived.

These large animals are thus able to travel between Africa and Europe on land masses during short receding periods of the sea between southern Italy, the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa.