News Paleontology Scotland’s Isle of Skye was once a dinosaur promenade Fossil footprints reveal both carnivores and herbivores strolled by an ancient lagoon A theropod dinosaur and a sauropod dinosaur strolling through soft sediments on what’s now the Isle of Skye in this artist’s reconstruction. Tone Blakesley and Scott Reid, CC-BY 4.0 By Carolyn Gramling 1 hour ago Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye was once a bustling dinosaur thoroughfare. A newly discovered set of at least 131 fossilized footprints dating to between 170 million and 166 million years ago reveals that both long-necked sauropods and carnivorous theropods splashed through the shallow waters of what was then a balmy, subtropical lagoon, imprinting their tracks onto the soft sands. These fossil trackways reveal that two main groups of dinosaurs casually strolled across what’s now Prince Charles’s Point on the Trotternish Peninsula of the island, paleontologist Tone Blakesley of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues report April 2 in PLOS One. Sets of three-toed tracks point to bipedal carnivorous theropods, which were probably species of megalosaurs, based on previous fossil data from the region, the researchers say. A second group of footprints, round and huge, were probably left by a species of sauropod. Based on the spacing of the footprints, the dinosaurs that left these tracks weren’t in any hurry or heading anywhere in particular. The tracks don’t have a consistent direction, and the spacing indicates that the dinosaurs were moving at a walking speed — in other words, they were casually milling about, the team suggests. Two footprints in the sand, with the difference in surface feature heights shown using color, reveals the imprints of two different dinosaurs’ feet at the ancient lagoon. At left, a theropod footprint shows the imprint of three toes, and at right, a sauropod footprint has rounded toes.Blakesley et al./PLOS ONE 2025 CC-BY 4.0 Fossils of dinosaurs dating to the Middle Jurassic Period, between about 175 million and 161 million years ago, are relatively rare. It was a harrowing time environmentally, marked by widespread volcanism and tectonic activity linked to the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, the opening of the central Atlantic Ocean, elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, high temperatures and swelling seas that rose and engulfed much of the land surface. Those aren’t great conditions for preserving fossils. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.