Futhi Ntshingila
25 April 2004
Johannesburg — A PROFESSOR who risked life and limb searching for dinosaur footprints in Zimbabwe has been told that a unique footprint discovered by himself and his colleagues was recently destroyed by a herd of elephants.
University of KwaZulu-Natal palaeontologist Professor Theagarten Lingham-Soliar and Zimbabwean geologists Ait-Kaci Ahmed and Tim Broderick discovered the 150 million-year-old footprint of the Brachiosaurus in December 2001.
The Brachiosaurus was the biggest plant-eating dinosaur on earth. It could grow as tall as 16m and weigh as much as 10 fully grown elephants.
This dinosaur resembled a giraffe, with a long neck and front legs which were longer than its hind ones.
The footprint of the dinosaur's back left foot was found in the Chewore area of northern Zimbabwe.
Broderick recently informed Lingham-Soliar that the footprint, the first to be discovered in sub-Saharan Africa, had been destroyed.
Broderick, who took pictures of the destroyed footprint, said: "The smoothly rubbed and rounded banks in the close vicinity are distinctly elephant traces and strong indications are that the agent of the destruction was a herd of elephants."
Only three toes of the footprint remain. Lingham-Soliar said the irony was that the track of the largest extinct land animal was destroyed by its largest existing counterpart.
At the time of the discovery, Lingham-Soliar and his team were unable to make a mould of the footprint as there was no latex available in strife-torn Zimbabwe. However, they did photograph it.
"The footprint was large, about a metre-long and 22cm deep," said Lingham-Soliar.
Initially Lingham-Soliar and Broderick discovered footprints of meat-eating dinosaurs, after a tip from local hunters.
"We followed it up and found the prints. .. The footprint was well preserved with a mound completely surrounding it," said Lingham-Soliar.
He added that the footprint was "first exposed after very heavy floods in northern Zimbabwe about 10 years ago".
Lingham-Soliar's paper, published in the scientific journal Neues Jarbuch, interpreted the walking patterns of dinosaurs, indicating that the Brachiosaurus did not waddle but walked like a dog.
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