First-ever adult Tyrannosaurus rex trackway discovered in North Dakota badlands
Rare Adult T. rex Footprints Reveal a Walk Through Ancient North Dakota
Wertynews.com – A sequence of enormous footprints in southwestern North Dakota has given paleontologists an exceptionally rare glimpse of an adult Tyrannosaurus rex in motion roughly 66.5 million years ago. The discovery, made in the badlands near Marmarth and close to the Montana line, includes four linked tracks that form the first confirmed trackway from a fully grown T. rex.
Fossil bones can reveal the size, anatomy and possible diet of extinct animals, but a trail of footprints offers something different: evidence of a single animal moving through its environment at a particular moment in time. Until this find, scientists had confirmed only two separate adult T. rex footprints worldwide. One was found in New Mexico and the other in Montana, yet neither isolated print could show the dinosaur’s direction, pace or pattern of movement.
“Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior,” said Dr. Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T. rex.”
Four Massive Prints in a 23-Foot Path
The trackway extends for approximately 23 feet and contains four three-toed impressions. Each print measures about 3 feet in length, underscoring the scale of the animal that left them behind. The spacing between the tracks enabled researchers to estimate that the dinosaur was walking at around 3.5 to 4.5 miles per hour.
That was a steady walking speed for an animal believed to have weighed more than seven tons. The footprint arrangement does not simply identify a large predator; it provides physical clues about how that predator traveled over the ancient ground. Connected tracks allow researchers to examine stride length and movement in ways that a lone fossilized footprint cannot.
The team identified T. rex as the likely maker of the prints through a combination of their dimensions, their three-toed form and the surrounding fossil record. Rocks in this area have yielded an unusually large number of tyrannosaur bones. Among the discoveries from the same badlands is a juvenile individual known as “Teen Rex.”
A Discovery Made During a Volunteer Dig
Kent Hups, a high school teacher and amateur fossil hunter, located the trackway in 2025 while volunteering on one of Lyson’s excavation projects. The site sits on land managed by the U.S. Forest Service near Marmarth.
“As a teacher, I'm always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation,” Hups said. “I never imagined that could lead me to a discovery like this.”
The discovery highlights the role careful fieldwork can play in paleontology. A fossil track may be less immediately recognizable than a large bone, particularly when it is embedded in weathered rock. Once recognized, though, a series of impressions can preserve evidence that no skeleton can provide: the path of an individual animal as it crossed an ancient landscape.
For students and visitors interested in dinosaur science, the North Dakota find also illustrates why fossil sites remain important even after bones have been collected from them. The same region can preserve many kinds of evidence, from skeletal remains to traces of behavior. Bones help establish what creatures lived there, while tracks can add information about what those creatures were doing.
Digital Study Across Continents
Researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science documented the site with three-dimensional scans. Those digital records were then examined by Peter Falkingham of Liverpool John Moores University in England, the paper’s lead author. Falkingham analyzed the 3D material and prepared the study without traveling to North Dakota personally.
The work was published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Detailed 3D documentation is especially valuable for a trackway because it records the shape, depth and placement of the impressions before the fossils are moved. It also allows specialists to study the evidence from elsewhere while preserving a digital representation of the original site.
Three of the four footprints are scheduled to be removed by helicopter this fall and transported to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Their relocation will make it possible to preserve and study the tracks beyond their exposed setting in the badlands.
A Walk Near the End of the Dinosaur Age
The tracks were formed near the close of the Cretaceous period, at about 66.5 million years ago. This places the animal’s journey near the end of the era when non-avian dinosaurs dominated many land ecosystems. Scientists believe an asteroid impact later brought that age to an end.
That timing gives the trackway a striking significance. These footprints represent one of the last known walks by a T. rex before the extinction event that eliminated the dinosaurs. Rather than offering only a distant outline of the famous predator, the four connected prints preserve a brief and tangible record of its movement: a huge animal walking across what is now the North Dakota badlands.
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