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Monumento Natural das Pegadas dos Dinossáurios

TIME : 2016/2/18 23:35:29

On the N357 10km south of Fátima in the village of Bairro, this quarry has more than a thousand individual prints, and is one of the most important locations for sauropod prints in the world. The visit starts with a 20-minute video in Portuguese, then you take a 1.5km walk around the quarry, first seeing the prints from above then walking among them.

These, the oldest and longest sauropod tracks in the world, record walks in the mud a trifling 175 million years ago. The dinos would have been stepping through carbonated mud, later transformed into limestone. As you walk across the slope you can clearly see the large elliptical prints made by the hind feet and the smaller, half-moon prints made by the forefeet.