Nature

Largest Dinosaur Foot Unearthed in Wyoming Identified

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A dinosaur foot that was unearthed some 20 years ago in Wyoming and nicknamed "Bigfoot" has been identified by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Excavated in Wyoming's Black Hills in 1998 by a team from the University of Kansas, the foot measuring nearly 3 feet wide was identified at the time as that belonging to "an extremely large animal," according to the study published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ.

Using a 3D scanner and comparing measurements to several other dinosaur species, scientists have now determined the foot belonged to a relative of the long-necked, long-tailed Brachiosaurus.

“This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America,” co-author Emanuel Tschopp, a Theodore Roosevelt Richard Gilder Graduate School postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology, said in a press release.

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Brachiosaurus is a herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that is prominently featured as the gentle, lumbering dinosaur in the Jurassic Park movie franchise. They walked the earth some 180 million years ago during the Late Triassic into in the Middle Jurassic and could grow to nearly 100 feet in height, according to the University of California, Berkeley.

The study also revealed that the massive creature lived in a larger area of North America than previously thought, from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming.

“This is surprising,” said Tschopp. “Many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time.”