Chinese and German experts on Thursday said they had unearthed a large group of fossilized dinosaur tracks, the largest cluster ever found in China, in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The find, in a small county east of here, consists of more than 150 tridactyl footprint fossils distributed randomly on the slope of a 100-meter sandstone incline.
The largest is 33.6 centimeters long, while the smallest is a mere 11.4 cm. Experts confirmed that the footprints were made by two kinds of large carnivorous dinosaurs, known as theropods. They lived during the Middle Jurassic Period, about 165 million years ago, said professor Sun Ge, a paleontologist at Jilin University in northeast China.
Judging by the footprints, the dinosaurs would have been three to five meters tall, eight to 10 meters long and weighed two to three tons, scientists said.