For 66.5 million years, this trail sat buried and forgotten in the North Dakota badlands. But now paleontologists have something they have never had before. A real, connected sequence of footprints left by a full-grown Tyrannosaurus T.rex, showing exactly how the most famous predator in history actually walked.
The discovery was published on September 8 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and it is already being called one of the most important T. rex finds in decades.
How This Incredible Discovery Happened
The story behind this is almost as remarkable as the fossil itself. Kent Hups, a Colorado high school teacher and longtime amateur fossil hunter, was scouting for new dig sites in 2025 while recovering from knee surgery. Looking for an easy path out of a narrow valley, he noticed something strange poking out of the ground.
“I saw something sticking up out of the ground, and it looked really peculiar, like nothing I had ever seen before,” Hups later recalled. What he had stepped onto looked like a giant three-toed impression, unlike anything he had encountered across three decades of fossil hunting. He carefully documented it in his field notebook, noting even the possibility of additional tracks nearby.
When Hups brought his findings to Dr. Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, skepticism was the natural first reaction. Before this discovery, scientists had confirmed only two isolated adult Tyrannosaurus T. rex footprints anywhere in the world, one in New Mexico and one in Montana. A connected trackway seemed almost too good to be true.
The site, located near Marmarth in the Hell Creek Formation, turned out to hold four connected three-toed footprints stretching roughly 23 feet, each print measuring about three feet long. Researchers used high resolution 3D scanning to document every detail before deciding how to proceed with the fragile find.
What These Footprints Actually Reveal
Bones can tell scientists an enormous amount about how an animal was built. Footprints tell a completely different story. Dr. Lyson explained the distinction beautifully in a statement following the paper’s publication.
“Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior,” he said, adding that a trackway lets researchers “actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape,” something he called “incredibly rare for T. rex.”
Using the spacing between each print roughly 13 feet apart, researchers calculated the dinosaur’s walking speed at somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5 miles per hour. That is essentially a brisk human walking pace, which is a fairly humbling detail considering this particular animal weighed more than seven tons.
Despite its massive size, this T. rex was not sprinting or hunting in that moment. It was simply strolling across ancient wetlands, completely unaware it was leaving behind a message that would take over 66 million years to be read.
Researchers attributed the tracks specifically to an adult Tyrannosaurus T.rex based on the sheer size of the prints, their narrow toe spacing, and the surrounding rock layer’s unusually high concentration of tyrannosaur fossils.
A Quick Look at the King of the Cretaceous
Tyrannosaurus rex remains one of the most recognizable predators to have ever walked the Earth. It roamed what is now North America roughly 68 to 66 million years ago, right at the very end of the Cretaceous period, standing among the largest land based carnivores in history.
Its reign came to an abrupt end alongside most other dinosaur species following a massive asteroid impact around 66 million years ago, an event widely accepted by scientists as the trigger behind the mass extinction that wiped out roughly three quarters of all life on Earth at the time.
Remarkably, this newly discovered trackway dates to just before that catastrophic event, making it essentially one of the final recorded moments of T. rex activity before its entire species vanished forever.
Why Footprints Like This Are So Rare
Given how iconic T. rex is in popular culture, it might surprise people just how little direct footprint evidence has ever surfaced.
Large theropod tracks are exceptionally uncommon in the Hell Creek Formation specifically, since the ancient streams and swamps that once covered the region tended to erase footprints before they could ever fossilize properly.
That rarity is exactly what makes this trackway so scientifically valuable. Researchers plan to physically remove three of the four footprints later this fall, carefully airlifting them out by helicopter to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for closer study.
For paleontologists, this discovery offers something fossils alone rarely can, a genuine glimpse of movement, captured in stone, from an animal that vanished from Earth tens of millions of years before humans ever existed to wonder about it.
