Despite being prehistoric predator and prey, massive meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs drank together from shallow freshwater lagoons on the Isle of Skye, 167 million years ago, according to newly identified tracks.
The 131 footprints at Prince Charles’s Point on Skye’s Trotternish Peninsula makes the site one of Scotland’s largest and, thanks to the dominance of footprints from carnivorous megalosaurs – cousins and ancestors of T. rex – one of the rarest in the world.
The discovery has given scientists invaluable insights into the environmental preferences and behaviours of dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic period.
The 131 footprints at Prince Charles’s Point on Skye’s Trotternish Peninsula makes the site one of Scotland’s largest and, thanks to the dominance of footprints from carnivorous megalosaurs – cousins and ancestors of T. rex – one of the rarest in the world.
The discovery has given scientists invaluable insights into the environmental preferences and behaviours of dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic period.
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AnimalsTranscript
00:00The Isle of Skye is renowned for its mountainous cliffs, windswept moors and rugged shorelines.
00:26Hidden on one of its wild and remote shorelines is evidence of another time and another place.
00:34A place that was much warmer and more humid than it is today.
00:40A subtropical place where 167 million years ago the dinosaurs left their footprints.
00:51Today that place is Prince Charles' Point, a bay and rocky precipice situated on Skye's
00:58Trotnish Peninsula.
01:00A place that was named after Bonnie Prince Charlie, who briefly hid here in 1746 during
01:07his flight across the Highlands after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden.
01:13Since then, we've gone on to discover that Prince Charles' Point was in fact a hotbed
01:19for dinosaurs, with 131 dinosaur footprints recorded to date.
01:26Representing large meat-eating theropods like Megalosaurus, the ancestors of T. rex, to
01:34those lumbering giants, the long-necked plant-eating sauropods, all scattered across this vast
01:42fossilised, rippled surface, the margins of this prehistoric lagoon.
01:49And when you look at these ripples today, it's just amazing to think that they're 167
01:55million years old, because they just look like they've been made yesterday.
02:00That's one of the thrills of coming to this location, is seeing all these footprints in
02:05a frozen moment in time, and it's just always surreal for me.
02:13So my name is Tone Blakesley, I'm a Master's graduate from the University of Edinburgh,
02:19and I researched and co-discovered the dinosaur footprints here at Prince Charles' Point.
02:25And this is the story behind those footprints.
02:42Our story begins 167 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic period, a time when sky
02:56emerged as a newly formed island in the early Atlantic Ocean.
03:02On that island, tall mountainous peaks were drained by powerful rivers, meandering and
03:09sweeping across the land, emptying into these huge river deltas, fringed by mudflats and
03:17lagoon margins that were teeming with dinosaurs.
03:23To me, the most striking thing about the fossils of Sea and Sky is that they reveal just how
03:30different Scotland was back in the Middle Jurassic than it is today.
03:35We all know Scotland today, especially those of us that live here.
03:37We know what the climate's like, we know what the weather's like, we know about the rain,
03:43we know about the high latitude and how dark it is in the winter, and, you know, we feel
03:47this stuff, we live it.
03:49But back in the Jurassic, Scotland was just so different.
03:52This was a time roughly between about 180 and 160 million years ago, give or take.
03:59And it was like parts of Spain or parts of California today.
04:03It was a subtropical, quite lush, verdant environment.
04:07It was part of an island.
04:09That island was in the Atlantic Ocean, really just a narrow seaway at that point.
04:14And by this time, dinosaurs, they spread around the world to more places, they grew in size.
04:19You had the big meat-eaters, big long-necked dinosaurs, stegosaurs with the plates on their
04:23backs and so on.
04:26So much of that underpinning of dinosaur evolution was happening in the middle Jurassic.
04:34And that's a little bit frustrating, though, because we don't have a whole lot of fossils
04:38of that age.
04:39And that's where the Isle of Skye turns out to be quite important here in Scotland, because
04:42it has rocks that are full of fossils right from that middle Jurassic age, and they help
04:47tell the story of how dinosaurs were evolving during this time.
04:52And Prince Charles's Point is very much a part of that story.
04:57And surprisingly, it wasn't until 2019 that we found the first footprints here.
05:04It was on an autumnal August afternoon that I was wandering along the shore with local
05:09Gaelic singer Anne Martin, visiting student Victoria Bradder, and Dougal Ross, the curator
05:16of the Staffan Museum, when we found the first few footprints.
05:22I remember that day we went to Prince Charles's Point at Kilmure.
05:26We discovered three amazing theropod footprints that day.
05:31And from there on, we went on to identify 171 in total.
05:38Being a local, it gives me a lot of satisfaction that these footprints are being found so close
05:43by.
05:44And it's really awakened the attention of not just the academics, but also local people
05:50who are showing a keen interest.
05:53To just to see these, I mean, it's amazing.
05:56Just gives you an idea of the kind of bulk that would have one foot there, I can't even
06:06reach that one with my other foot, poof, and then in there, I mean, huge, huge animal.
06:12You can just, you can kind of feel like we're not shuddering.
06:18There is something very beautiful about the fact that these footsteps have been here unbeknownst
06:28to us all.
06:29Yeah.
06:30And I keep thinking about, you know, like my grandparents' generation and those that
06:37were here before, or even, you know, Bonnie Prince-Charling appearing on the, on the
06:41landscape here and with no knowledge, no knowledge at all of what had gone before.
06:48And I find that quite breathtaking.
06:51And there it is, just down here, the one.
06:55That's the one, which I love to bits.
07:00And it goes right underneath there.
07:04And then Jiggy just picking up this stone and revealing that middle toe, which goes
07:11right, it's really long, isn't it?
07:14Yeah.
07:15That was amazing, finding it that day.
07:17Yeah, sure, I forgot about that.
07:19And with so many footprints scattered across the site, we needed to document them, not
07:25only on the ground, but also from the air above.
07:31To achieve this, I enlisted the help of colleagues from the University of Edinburgh in April
07:362023.
07:39They included paleontology master students who helped by clearing many of the footprints
07:44of sand and water, as well as taking important field measurements, such as bearing.
07:52Alongside them were drone technicians Tom Wade and Craig Atkins, who set up the ground
07:57survey stations to relay precise GPS coordinates to their trusty drone.
08:03Its mission was to photograph the entire track site for the first time and allow us to use
08:08those photographs, alongside those taken by hand, to digitally preserve the footprints
08:14as 3D models for current and future research.
08:20With the tide at bay and a vast area to cover, it was time to commence our three-and-a-half
08:28hour photo shoot.
08:31I think the zigzag covered it, but like not a lot there.
08:36I was just doing that little corner there.
08:38Yeah.
08:39There we go.
08:42By overlapping the photographs, we could then use specialist software to digitally reconstruct
08:47the track site and allow us to see the footprints as never before.
09:18It's through these models that we can peer into the past and produce site blueprints
09:25mapping out the many pathways of the dinosaurs that once roamed here, preserving those brief
09:31moments in time.
09:34Now, one of the things which I observed at Prince Charles's Point on our site blueprints,
09:51and as well in the field, is the variety of directions to which our dinosaurs travelled.
09:57This is something that is particularly important because it tells us about the local geography
10:02of the area.
10:04We can visualise the direction of travel that these dinosaurs went in in what's called a
10:08Windrose diagram.
10:10We can see the theropods, represented in the red, and the sauropods in the blue, all going
10:16in a manner of directions.
10:18But what's interesting in that diagram is that none of the dinosaurs appear to have
10:23travelled to the south-east.
10:25Now we could speculate that in the south-east there was some sort of obstruction preventing
10:30them from travelling.
10:31Maybe it was deeper water.
10:34But because of a lack of wave-cut platform here, we can't really verify that, unfortunately.
10:39We can only speculate.
10:42But what's really exciting is that the random directions of these dinosaurs demonstrates
10:48that the lagoon margin which they traversed was a vast, wide, open space.
10:56A vast, wide, open space that was clearly bustling over a short period of time prior
11:02to being buried.
11:05But what about the dinosaurs themselves?
11:08What exactly traversed this lagoon margin 167 million years ago?
11:15To find out, we need to look more closely at the finer details that make up these footprints.
11:22Today, I've invited back local sky-paleontologist Siobhan McFarlane to show her some of the
11:28dinosaur footprints we've uncovered.
11:31Hey Siobhan, how are you doing?
11:33I'm good, how are you, Tone?
11:35Yeah, it feels like we were only here literally just yesterday.
11:38Yeah.
11:39Ready to go looking for some dinosaurs?
11:40I am so ready.
11:41Let's do it.
11:42Okay, let's head this way.
11:48So what we have here is probably one of my favourite set of footprints at the location.
11:53It's this pair of crossing theropod tracks.
11:58Can you see the first trackway coming along here?
12:00It's kind of faint, but visible and sharp once you get your eye in.
12:05So you've got the one trackmaker on the right here, which has got much bulkier toes.
12:10And then we have the one on the left, which is much slender, digited.
12:14What tells us that these are theropods?
12:16So the evidence that we have that these are theropods is of course the really sort of
12:22moderately slender free toes and the ferocious claw marks accompanied by these rounded bulges
12:30on the side, which are where the phalangeal pads would have been impressed.
12:35These pads that we can see here in our fingers, which were also in the feet of these dinosaurs,
12:41which would have housed these very powerful muscles that this animal would have used in
12:46combination with its sharp claws to claw its way into its prey.
12:51So it's a powerful, powerful dinosaur.
12:53Yeah, not something you want to get on the wrong side of, particularly at breakfast time.
13:00So can we tell how tall these dinosaurs would have been?
13:03We can actually measure the length of the foot here to estimate hip height.
13:08What we do is we measure from the base of the claw mark, where the toe ends, to the heel down here.
13:18And we can see it comes out at about 45 centimetres, which if we multiply by four,
13:26gives us an estimated hip height of about 1.8 metres, which is about as tall as our cameraman over here.
13:34Wow. So do we know what kind of theropods made these prints?
13:38When we compare this to other similarly aged tracks from around the world, North America, Europe,
13:45we find that they were made by probable megalosaurs.
13:49Megalosaurs were the precursors to T. rex, sort of ancient ancestors,
13:55and they too would have been hunting those pesky herbivorous dinosaurs.
14:00So very much meat-eating dinosaurs.
14:01The whole yes, that's for sure.
14:06There's decent odds that the big three-toed tracks were made by an animal like Megalosaurus.
14:12They were certainly made by a meat-eating theropod dinosaur.
14:15Those are the only types of dinosaurs that have those type of feet.
14:19Megalosaurus was the very first dinosaur given a formal scientific name back in 1824,
14:25when some of his bones were found in England, in the Middle Jurassic.
14:29It was, for its time, a pretty big meat-eating dinosaur.
14:32It would have been an apex predator, top of the food chain.
14:35It was a local dinosaur at that time that the sky footprints were made.
14:40It seems to have been a pretty common dinosaur, at least in what is now England,
14:44which would have been very, very, very close to what is now sky.
14:48And the size of Megalosaurus is roughly the size of a jeep or a really big car.
14:53That size fits the size of the track.
14:55So all things considered, Megalosaurus, or a really close relative,
14:59is probably one of the most likely track makers.
15:03But the theropods weren't the only dinosaurs roaming this ancient lagoon margin.
15:10So the other type of dinosaur that we have here at Prince Charles's Point
15:13are these very flat and rounded footprints.
15:18Some of them have got toes, but most of them don't.
15:22These are the footprints of sauropods, these long-necked dinosaurs,
15:27plant eaters that would have fed on trees that were tens of metres tall,
15:31taking advantage of a niche that other dinosaurs couldn't.
15:35And here we've got a track way of about eight,
15:39a left-right stride going along here.
15:42It's a very rhythmic pattern that's been left.
15:45And the footprints, although this one looks fairly regularly shaped,
15:49it's actually irregular.
15:50You can see here it sort of widens here and then narrows in towards the heel down here.
15:57And some of these even come with their own toes and claw marks too,
16:02which is really, really cool.
16:04Sort of veering off to the side or facing forwards.
16:09And on rare occasions, we can see a crescent-shaped handprint
16:13with a sort of big thumb digit called the Pollux sticking out to the lower side.
16:21Why is it that we don't see any handprints here?
16:24So this dinosaur overprinted its handprints with its hindprints,
16:30these big, large circular ones.
16:32We do see them, hints of them occasionally.
16:36Maybe in that one there, we can see like the hint of one.
16:40There's a little bit more, yes.
16:42Yeah, you see it, there's a bit of a crescent sticking out here,
16:46a very compressed one at that, that's been squished by this big footprint here.
16:54But one of the things that sort of struck me when I first saw these
16:57is that these are incredibly flat, right?
17:01They're not really deep.
17:03You imagine sauropods as being these really heavy, lumbering beasts,
17:07and you just sort of imagine them punching through the different layers of sediment at the time.
17:13But no, these are like disks, you know, they're really flat.
17:17Very shallow in comparison to the other prints that we've seen.
17:20And as it turns out, the cause for such shallow footprints
17:24lay just centimetres below the dinosaur's feet, a layer of hardened mud.
17:31So whenever a dinosaur walked through, rather than sinking down,
17:35their feet caused the overlying layer of sand to spread horizontally across the mud,
17:41to then exude upwards and form these onion ring-like structures
17:45called displacement rims around each footprint.
17:49Forcing this out from the prints.
17:52Yeah, yeah, almost forming like a little mini crater in a way.
17:55But that feature is gone.
17:57But we do see it in other footprints at the locality
18:01where you can see these ripples running across the surface of that mound.
18:08I was just wondering about the speed, because these are so close together.
18:11And when you think about how big and heavy this animal was,
18:17it's like it's barely moving compared to the theropods.
18:22This animal would have been much bigger than our theropod,
18:26probably reaching about 15 or 20 metres in length.
18:31When it comes to the speed it was moving at,
18:34we multiply the length by four to get a hip height of two metres.
18:40We can then in combination measure the distance between each footprint in the stride
18:47and then put it into an even fancier equation.
18:51We find out this dinosaur was moving at about 0.69 metres per second.
18:57Oh goodness.
18:58It's about half the average human walking speed,
19:03which is about five kilometres per hour.
19:05Sounds like a very gentle dinosaur.
19:06Oh yes.
19:07Very slow paced.
19:08It was very relaxed.
19:10It wasn't in a situation of any danger.
19:13Of course, all around us, in fact just behind you,
19:16there are some theropod footprints making a beeline towards these sauropods.
19:20So this dinosaur could have been on the trail of them.
19:24Is that another single animal travelling or is there multiple animals?
19:27So it would have been an individual.
19:30We know that these animals walk in their own direction.
19:34They don't seem to follow one another.
19:36They're quite confident hunters.
19:38They don't need to hunt in a big pack as such.
19:41They were solitary at the time,
19:43but whether they hunted in packs remains to be seen.
19:46Yeah.
19:47We need to find more tracks to tell us.
19:50Exactly.
19:52Yeah, the sauropod tracks to me are really intriguing
19:55because when I moved to Scotland
19:57and started my job here at the University of Edinburgh in 2013,
20:01there were some bones of sauropods that have been found on Skye,
20:04including that limb bone that was one of the first two dinosaur bones ever found in Scotland.
20:09But nobody had reported their footprints from Skye.
20:11And then a few years later, when Tom Challens and I were out at Duntullam,
20:15it dawned on us there that these tide pools were made from dinosaur footprints.
20:20Seemed to be a sequence to a lot of them, a left-right, left-right zigzagging sequence.
20:24And then we looked closer and these things were big.
20:27They're about the size of car tires, but they weren't just round circles.
20:31They had some shape to them.
20:32They had little bits sticking off one end that really looked like the impressions of toes.
20:37And now we know what to look for.
20:38We know that these big, fairly circular,
20:42but sometimes slightly off-circular holes in the rock in the tidal zone
20:46could be dinosaur footprints.
20:48So now, at Prince Charles's Point and other places,
20:51we've started to recognize more of these sauropod tracks.
20:54And it does seem like they're more common in the lagoonal rocks,
20:58these rocks that were formed in very, very shallow water
21:02or at that interface between water and land.
21:04They're not really so common, not really at all,
21:08unlike the mud rocks that were the mud flats or a little bit farther from the beaches.
21:12So I think that's hinting at some kind of environmental preference
21:16for these different dinosaurs.
21:18We can start to envision that the long-necked dinosaurs
21:22seem to have enjoyed living more by the water,
21:26wading around in the shallow water.
21:28And the stegosaurs and the duck-billed dinosaurs and so on
21:32maybe were a little bit more land-bound.
21:34But, you know, that's just a hypothesis.
21:36It's a theory.
21:36We've got to test it as we continue to find more dinosaur tracks.
21:39And that's why we're always out looking for more fossils.
21:44Thanks to our research, we now know that large megalosaurs and sauropods
21:50once roamed across a shallowly submerged lagoon margin,
21:55set in the heart of this vast river delta spanning as far as the eye could see.
22:02With all this in mind, imagine that you're just standing on this spot,
22:07surrounded by these footprints and ripples 167 million years ago.
22:14It's dark and the sun is slowly rising.
22:23As you breathe in the warm subtropical humid air,
22:27you feel refreshingly cooled as the shallow lagoon waters lap around your feet.
22:36Through the fine early morning mist,
22:38you'd only see as far as a thin sliver of lagoonal shoreline.
22:43Dotted along it, the ghostly ashen silhouettes of conifers and tree ferns,
22:49as well as half a dozen sleepy long-necked sauropods
22:54munching on the tall foliage and venturing out once more
22:59into the lagoon margin where you stand.
23:03Gradually, the sauropods' necks rise with the sun
23:07as the vibrant colour shimmers the remote subtropical landscape.
23:11As the mist thins to a fine wisp,
23:14a vast network of lagoons and vegetated islands open up around you,
23:20each with their own early rises.
23:23One of them, a lone megalosaur, the local apex predator.
23:29It traverses across the lagoon margin,
23:32eyeing up its next meal as the sun catches its razor-sharp teeth.
23:38The lagoon plain now stretches kilometres in either direction,
23:43enclosed either side by spectacular forested uplands
23:48floating on the receding mist as the dinosaurs left their footprints once more.
24:04And although we'll never get to see the dinosaurs that left these footprints,
24:08what we do have is a valuable record of their existence
24:12in Scotland during the Middle Jurassic.
24:16It just goes to show that you never know
24:19where the next great dinosaur discovery might lie.
24:24Right, let's go look for some more dinosaurs.