Largest dinosaur footprints in Europe found in Swiss Alps

Palaeontologists have discovered what they claim are the largest dinosaur footprints ever to be found in Europe -- half way up a Swiss mountain.

A team at the Natural History Museum in Basel found the footprints at 3,300 metres on a mountain in the Ela Nature Reserve, Switzerland's largest park.

According to the palaeontologists, the three-toed animal, which probably measured between 15 and 20 feet long, walked through what is now the Swiss Alps more than 210 million years ago.

The 15-inch-long prints belonged to a carnivore from the Triassic period that would have been the biggest predator on the planet at the time.

And, the footprints were originally made when the region was a huge tropical coast before millions of years of geological pressure folded the land into mountains, the team members said.

via Largest dinosaur footprints in Europe found in Swiss Alps.