The Herald - The Herald Magazine
174 MILLION YEARS BC
Meet the palaeontologists whose finds are helping Skye earn a reputation as Scotland’s Jurassic isle
BENEATH the ruins of Duntulm Castle in Skye, a rocky tidal platform juts out into the waves. At first glance its pitted and pockmarked appearance, slightly raised above the boulder-strewn beach on the Trotternish peninsula, is nothing special, a typically sea-ravaged scene.
Yet upon closer inspection there is a pattern among the potholed cracks and crevices that line the surface. They crisscross over one another, zig-zagging across the vast sandstone and limestone slab. Some have distinct toe shapes. On dustbin lid-sized feet. Welcome to the “dinosaur disco”.
It was here that a team of Edinburgh University scientists discovered the largest trackway of dinosaur prints ever to have been found in Scotland. They belong to sauropods – distant relatives of brontosaurus and diplodocus – and date from the Middle Jurassic period. The 170-million-year-old footprints exist in several layers of rocks that formed from sediments at the bottom of what was once a shallow saltwater lagoon.
Palaeontologists Dr Steve Brusatte and Dr Tom Challands had been working on the beach with a group of students in April 2015 and it was only while packing up
their kit, that a curious-looking depression in the rocks made them do a double take.
Earlier that afternoon, they had spotted a similar shape on another part of the beach. “We looked at each other and thought, ‘That’s odd,’ but didn’t say anything at first,” recalls Brusatte, who coined the phrase “dinosaur disco”. “Then we saw another one. We stopped and started to look around and noticed there was a lot of them.
“They look like potholes or little tidal pools. That isn’t too surprising because you are in a tidal zone, but what we began to notice is that there seemed to be a pattern. There was a bit of a zig-zag, this left-and-right sequence. They were all of the same size, which would be peculiar if you just had random tidal erosion.
“Then we noticed there was some stickyout bits, way up near the tideline where the boulders meet the rock platform. There were bits of limestone sticking up like pedestals. They were also pretty consistent in size and shape.
“We could see that some of them had little bits sticking out from one side and we realised those things were toes. Then it all came together and we realised they were footprints.”
The duo and their team had spent hours crawling on hands and knees with magnifying lenses, combing the rocks
SINCE 1982 A RISING NUMBER OF DINOSAUR FOSSILS HAVE BEEN FOUND ON ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST BELOVED ISLANDS. SO WHAT DREW THE GIANT BEASTS TO SKYE – AND WHAT MIGHT STILL BE AWAITING DISCOVERY?