Imagine walking along a beach when you find dinosaur footprints preserved in stone for 200 million years.
That may seem like the plot of a children’s book, but for 10-year-old Tegan, it became her own ‘cool and exciting’ reality on the south Wales coast.
She had travelled all the way from Pontardawe near Swansea to the Vale of Glamorgan with her mother Claire on the hunt for some fossils.
It turned out their pick of a spot amid red siltstone rock along a stretch of coast known as a prehistoric hotspot was exactly on the mark.
Footprint or bone discoveries emerge from there every five or so years, with an entire skeleton of a 201-million-year-old dracoraptor – a meat-eating cousin of the T-rex – unearthed in 2014.
But Tegan found not just one, but five footprints up to three quarters of a metre apart, indicating a dinosaur of considerable size.
Tegan said: ‘We were just out looking to see what we could find, we didn’t think we’d find anything.
‘We found these were big holes that looked like dinosaur footprints, so mum took some pictures, emailed the museum and it was from a long-necked dinosaur.’
The exact species is yet to be verified, but they’re believed to have been left by a camelotia, a huge herbivore from the late triassic period, according to Cindy Howells, a paleontology curator at the National Museum Wales.
She told the BBC: ‘These footprints are so big, it would have to be a type of dinosaur called a sauropodomorpha.’
The expert of 40 years added: ‘If they were random holes, we’d be wary but because we have a left foot, a right foot and then a left and another right… there’s a consistent distance between them.
‘It’s quite a significant find – the buzz you get when someone contacts us with a definite dinosaur find, it’s amazing.’
That buzz is most acutely felt by Tegan, who’s been invigorated by the find.
Her mum Claire said: ‘It’s hard to comprehend you’re walking on the same beach that hundreds of millions of years ago some massive prehistoric animal was here,” she said.
‘You can spend a lifetime looking for dinosaur treasures so for it to happen for Tegan at this age is great.’
This region of south Wales would have been a hot desert subject to flash floods when the 10ft tall camelotia roamed around.
With a long neck and tail, the dinosaur walked on two legs but often grazed while stood on four.
Over time the area changed from an environment akin to the Middle East now, Howells said, to warm, shallow tropical seas sprinkled with islands like the Mediterranean now.
Dinosaurs might not live their now, but the traces they left behind shed light on a history often preserved only in fossils.
Museums are counting on enthusiasts like Tegan to provide a seemingly endless bounty of material to study.
Howells said: ‘In museums, we don’t have time to go out and do that exploration ourlseves so we rely on people like Tegan doing it for us. We can’t do our job without it.’
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