A ten-year-old girl discovered 200 million-year-old dinosaur tracks while playing on the beach. Photo

A ten-year-old girl named Tegan, while walking with her mother on the south coast of Wales, found several dinosaur footprints that had been preserved on stone for 200 million years. The mother and daughter walked from Pontardawe near Swansea to the Vale of Glamorgan in search of fossils.

It turned out that they had chosen a spot among the red siltstone cliffs along the coast known as a prehistoric hotspot. Every five or so years, tracks or bones emerge from the site, and in 2014, a complete skeleton of a 201 million-year-old draconian, a carnivorous cousin of the T-rex, was found, according to the Metro website.

But Tegan found not one, but five footprints up to three-quarters of a meter apart, indicating a dinosaur of impressive size.

"We were just looking to see what we could find, but we didn't think we would find anything. We saw that it looked like dinosaur footprints, so my mom took some pictures and emailed them to the museum," the girl says.

The exact species has yet to be verified, but according to Cindy Howells, curator of paleontology at the National Museum of Wales, they were left by a camelotia, a huge herbivore from the late Triassic period.

"These footprints are so big that it would have to be a type of dinosaur called aSauropodomorpha," the scientist commented, adding that it was a very important find.

Ten-year-old Tegan and her mother, Claire, are very happy to have found these tracks.

"You can spend your whole life looking for dinosaur treasures, so for this to happen for Tegan at this age is great. It's hard to realize that you're walking on the same beach where some huge prehistoric animal was hundreds of millions of years ago," Claire said.

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