A research team has found more than 260 matching dinosaur footprints spread across two continents—South America and Africa—dating back to around 120 million years ago, setting them in the Early Cretaceous period. This provides solid evidence that the modern-day countries of Brazil and Cameroon were once connected before they were ripped apart by continental drift and the forming of the Atlantic Ocean.
Even more specifically, the footprints were found in the Borborema region of northeastern Brazil and the Koum Basin in northern Cameroon. They are nearly identical in shape, age, and “geological context,” according to Southern Methodist University paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs. The study he authored detailing his team’s findings was published by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.
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We’re all familiar with Pangaea, the supercontinent that included every continent in one until the movement of the tectonic plates ripped it apart. Since every nation on Earth was one big landmass, dinosaurs were able to roam freely—for instance, from what we now call South America to West Africa.
The imprints left behind are from a diverse collection of dinosaurs, a mix of herbivores and carnivores—mostly three-toed theropods with some sauropod and ornithischian footprints mixed in. The creatures’ footprints were preserved in the mud and silt of prehistoric river and lake sediment, along with fossilized pollen. The discovery of the pollen means there were plenty of plants to feed the herbivores and plenty of herbivores to feed the carnivores.
The prints were found in a geological feature called a half-graben basin, an elongated depression formed when the Earth’s crust was pulled apart. The evidence suggests that dinosaurs may have used these basins as migration routes.
Jacobs discovered the tracks on the Cameroonian side in the late 1980s. He later became friends with another paleontologist named Ismar de Souza Carvalho, who was studying the tracks on the Brazilian side. They shared their research and, decades later, published a paper containing one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in paleontological history.
