If you saw these dips in the floor of your local restaurant, would you think they were dinosaur footprints?

Well, one diner at the Garden Restaurant in Sichuan Province, China, suspected there was something going on – and helped reveal an extraordinary set of sauropod tracks.

‘It turns out they’re the 50-60cm long fossilised footprints of the long-necked sauropod dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous period around 100million years ago,’ says Dr Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab.

‘This is a really exciting find because it shows that important dinosaur tracks can be found in unexpected places.’

Definitely unexpected. The tracks were originally spotted in the 1950s, but at the time the building was then a home, so the owner covered them up to level out the ground. When it was reopened as a restaurant, the ‘pits’ were rediscovered.

‘But still nothing was thought to be unusual,’ says Associate Professor Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences. ‘That was until in mid-2022 when an observant diner pointed out that they might be something more than simply holes in the ground.

‘The footprints went unnoticed for so long, but once you know what they are, it’s hard to unsee them.

‘This region has no skeletal record of dinosaurs, so these fossilised tracks provide invaluable information about the types of dinosaurs that lived in the area.’

The sauropods are estimated to have been about 10m long, judging by the tracks. 

‘We compared the size of the footprints with complete fossil skeletons,’ Dr Romilio says. ‘We also know the dinosaurs were taking quite short steps for such a large animal, with a walking speed of around two kilometres per hour.’

And, as Dr Romilio points out, the dining dinosaur discovery highlights the importance of everyday people making valuable scientific contributions.

‘It’s a testament to the value of being curious about our surroundings and paying attention to the world around us,’ he says.

‘For some lucky people discoveries can come from unlikely places – even while you’re having a bite to eat.’

The study was published in Cretaceous Research.

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