A rare looping dinosaur trackway in Colorado reveals new clues about sauropod movement and hints that the massive animal may have walked with a limp.
Researchers studying an unusual looping trail of fossilized footprints in the United States have uncovered evidence suggesting the dinosaur that left them may have walked with a limp.
Near the town of Ouray in Colorado lies one of the most continuous and sharply turning sauropod trackways ever identified. This remarkable series of fossil footprints provides an unusually complete record of a dinosaur’s movement across ancient ground.
Dr. Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab examined more than 130 individual footprints that form a 95.5-meter path created roughly 150 million years ago.
“This was left in the Late Jurassic when long-necked dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Camarasaurus roamed North America,” Dr. Romilio said.
“This trackway is unique because it is a complete loop. While we may never know why this dinosaur curved back on itself, the trackway preserves an extremely rare chance to study how a giant sauropod handled a tight, looping turn before resuming its original direction of travel.”
Drone mapping reveals hidden detail
Co-author Dr. Paul Murphey from the San Diego Natural History Museum explained that documenting such a large tracksite required methods beyond traditional field observation.
“It has been challenging to document these footprints from the ground because of the size of the trackway,” Dr. Murphey said.
“We used drones to capture the entire trackway in high resolution.
“With these images we generated a detailed 3D model, which could then be digitally analyzed in the lab at millimeter-scale accuracy.”
Using the aerial imagery, researchers built a detailed digital reconstruction of the entire footprint trail.
This model allowed the team to examine the shape, spacing, and orientation of the prints with far greater precision than would be possible in the field alone.
Footprints reveal possible limp
The digital reconstruction allowed scientists to retrace the dinosaur’s route across the ancient landscape.
“It was clear from the start that this animal began walking toward the northeast, completed a full loop, and then finished facing the same direction again,” Dr. Romilio said.
“Within that loop, we found subtle, yet consistent, clues to its behavior. One of the clearest patterns was a variation in the width between left and right footprints, shifting from quite narrow to distinctly wide.”
He continues, “This shift from narrow to wide step placement shows that footprint width can change naturally as a dinosaur moves, meaning short trackway segments with seemingly consistent widths may give a misleading picture of its usual walking style.”
Uneven steps suggest a limp
“We also detected a small but persistent difference in left and right step lengths, of about 10 centimeters or 4 inches,” Dr. Romilio adds.
“Whether that reflects a limp or simply a preference for one side is hard to say. There are many long dinosaur trackways around the world where this method could be applied to extract behavioral information that was previously inaccessible.”
Reference: “Track by Track: Revealing Sauropod Turning and Lateralised Gait at the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite (Upper Jurassic, Bluff Sandstone, Colorado)” by Anthony Romilio, Paul C. Murphey, Neffra A. Matthews, Bruce A. Schumacher, Lance D. Murphey, Marcello Toscanini, Parker Boyce and Zach Fitzner, 20 November 2025, Geomatics.
DOI: 10.3390/geomatics5040067
The investigation of the track site has been supported by U.S. Forest Service.
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