The story

Paleontologists from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and Liverpool John Moores University discovered the first known trackway made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex in southwestern North Dakota. Kent Hups, a Colorado high school teacher and amateur fossil hunter, found the four connected, three-toed footprints in 2025 on U.S. Forest Service land in the Hell Creek Formation, not far from the Montana border according to New York Post, or not far from the Minnesota border according to CBS News.

The trackway is roughly 23 feet long, with footprints measuring around 3 feet long. The spacing between prints indicates the dinosaur had a stride of about 13 feet and was walking at approximately 3.5 to 4.5 mph. The tracks date to about 66.5 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous period, shortly before an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs. Before this discovery, only two isolated adult T. rex footprints had been confirmed anywhere in the world, one in New Mexico and one in Montana.

Researchers used 3D scanning technology to analyze the tracks. They attributed the prints to T. rex based on size, shape, and the abundance of tyrannosaur fossils in the area, including a juvenile specimen nicknamed Teen Rex discovered in 2022. Three of the four footprints are set to be airlifted by helicopter this fall and transported to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The findings were published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.