Newly discovered dinosaur tracks, the first ever reported from the Arabian Peninsula, indicate that a part of the now-arid region was teeming with dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.
The first set of fossilized footfalls was discovered about 50 kilometers north of Sana’a, Yemen, in 2003, says Nancy Stevens, a vertebrate paleontologist at OhioUniversity in Athens, Ohio. That series of 15 three-toed tracks was made by an ornithopod, a bipedal herbivore, which covered more than 2 meters with each stride, Stevens and her colleagues reported online May 21 in PloS ONE.
While some team members were unearthing those footprints, others discovered 11 more trackways nearby. Those sets of impressions, made by long-necked herbivores called sauropods, are parallel and are equally spaced from each other — a sign that the creatures, some adults and some juveniles, probably crossed an ancient mudflat as a group.
