MELBOURNE, Apr 24: Low-flying drones are providing palaeontologists a never before seen view of 130 million year old dinosaur footprints in Australia.
A research team from the University of Queensland is documenting hundreds of ancient dinosaur tracks left along the West Kimberley coast in Western Australia.
Researchers focused on using drones to get a bird’s eye view of the dinosaur footprints, said team leader Steve Salisbury, ABC reported.
“The drone allows us to get as close as we need to and customise the imagery we want, which is proving to be really, really interesting,” said Salisbury.
The footage from the drones will be fed into a sophisticated computer software that will eventually create 3D images of the dinosaur’s movements along the coast.
The tracks are preserved in stone along a 200-kilometre stretch of the coast.
Some of the tracks are large circular imprints left by sauropods, while others are more bird-like, three-toed theropod prints.
Documenting the track ways can be a challenge because some of them are located within jagged rocks and would be unrecognisable to the untrained eye, researchers said.
“So that’s really helping bring the coastline to life, and bring the track sites to life, because they’re a record of what the dinosaurs were doing 130 million years ago,” said Salisbury. (PTI)
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