Kent Hups was not looking to make history. It was 2025, and this secondary school teacher was in North Dakota, volunteering on a paleontological excavation, when he noticed something unusual in the rock.
What he found were four three-toed footprints, two on the left and two on the right, imprinted in the Hell Creek Formation 66,5 million years ago. A team from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and Liverpool John Moores University confirmed what seemed impossible: it was the first known fossil track of an adult Tyrannosaurus rex walking.
Using high-resolution 3D scanning, the scientists measured the complete trackway at seven meters, each footprint nearly 90 centimeters long and a stride of four meters. With those numbers, they calculated something that had never before been measured directly: the actual speed of an adult T. rex, between 5,6 and 7,2 km/h. Basically, the same speed at which you walk when you are in a hurry. Three of those footprints will travel by helicopter to the Denver museum to continue being studied.