An international team of paleontologists led by experts from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas (USA) has found matching sets of dinosaur tracks from the early Cretaceous period on opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean. This has been announced officially website scientific institution.
Scientists have discovered more than 260 tracks that show where dinosaurs last roamed freely on land between South America and Africa millions of years ago, before the two continents split apart.
According to experts, the discovered paw prints of ancient lizards match in terms of age, shape and geological data. Today, these 120 million-year-old prints are separated by a distance of approximately 6 thousand kilometers.
Africa and South America began to separate about 140 million years ago, causing cracks called faults to form along pre-existing weak spots in the Earth’s crust. They broke away from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, which in turn broke away from an even larger land mass called Pangaea.
As the tectonic plates beneath South America and Africa moved apart, magma from the Earth’s mantle rose to the surface, creating new oceanic crust as the continents moved apart. The resulting gap was filled by the South Atlantic Ocean.
Earlier archaeologists I learnedDinosaur tracks inspired the work of primitive Brazilian artists.