First Series of T. rex Fossil Footprints Discovered

Fossils of footprints and trackways are called “trace fossils”—the preservation of a creature’s behaviors or activities rather than the creature itself. There have been an abundance of trace fossils discovered over the years.

For example: Last year, I wrote about a massive sauropod trackway uncovered in the UK; in that same year, I wrote about 66 footprints from 47 dinosaurs discovered in a boulder in an Australian high school foyer; and in 2024, I wrote about matching dinosaur footprints found on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, fossil footprints are in the news again, this time with the discovery of four footprints that appear to be from an adult T. rex. The tracks were discovered by a paleontologist, who is also a high school science teacher, while he was fossil hunting in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota. It is the first adult T. rex trackway discovered, and researchers are hoping that further research will uncover at least one, if not more, additional footprints to add to the nearly 23-foot-long trackway.

Based on the tracks, researchers estimate the individual was walking at “about 1.6 meters per second, roughly equivalent to a person’s quick walking pace” (though they admit they can’t be sure due to the nature of trying to interpret trackways).

The article detailing the find explains how these footprints are thought to form:

The tracks stick up out of the ground because sediment filled in the originally muddy footprints, which then eroded away more slowly than the surrounding rock.

In this view, these footprints have been sitting in the ground for 66 million years (and have not been destroyed by weathering or other geological processes over all those eons of time) and only just now happen to have eroded enough for us to find them. What a coincidence!

And that’s not the only trace fossil find currently making headlines. A horseshoe crab trackway has also recently been discovered, this one left behind by “a previously unknown giant horseshoe crab species” in East China. (On display in our fossil hallway at the Creation Museum, we have a spectacular trackway left behind by a horseshoe crab—and at the end of the trackway, the crab itself! It’s an amazing fossil.)

The popular science article explains:

Fossilized tracks of a previously unknown giant horseshoe crab species dating back more than 240 million years have been discovered in East China, offering new evidence that marine ecosystems recovered much faster after Earth’s deadliest mass extinction than previously thought [another installment of “Everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong”!]. . . .

Researchers identified nine complex track and trail imprints across two marlstone surfaces. . . .

“The new discovery pushes the emergence of giant horseshoe crabs back to the Early Triassic epoch” [i.e., the evolution of horseshoe crabs is rewritten. Evolution is always being rewritten!]. . . .

Though horseshoe crabs are known as “living fossils” with broadly stable body structures over hundreds of millions of years [in other words, no evolution has occurred over hundreds of millions of years], the study shows extinct lineages evolved extraordinary body sizes and distinct behavioral patterns [they observed minor variation within a kind].

There’s a better explanation for why we find so many well-preserved fossils of fragile footprints—the global Flood of Noah’s day!

So how do fossil footprints form? Well, the footprints have to be buried very quickly before they can wash away or be destroyed by bioturbation (the everyday process of animals and plants turning up and rearranging the soil). Evolutionists appeal to small, localized floods or storms or even the tide washing in new sediment for the formation of fossil footprints. But there’s a better explanation for why we find so many well-preserved fossils of fragile footprints—the global Flood of Noah’s day!

The Flood would’ve rapidly buried the trackways of animals fleeing the rising floodwaters, preserving them deeply and protecting them from erosion and bioturbation. Footprints and other trace fossils are a reminder that there really was a global Flood as described in Genesis.

Yes, the Bible’s history is true, and it explains what we observe around us.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.