DISCOVER MAGAZINE (2/11/2022)
About 100 millions years ago, dinosaurs roamed through the coast of the ancient Tethys ocean that covered most of the modern Middle East. Recently, dozens of their footprints have been found on the arid mountain of Safaha, southwest of the city of Shobak, in the south of Jordan.
In 2019, two Polish doctors stumbled across three-toed footprints while hiking between Shobak and the ancient city of Petra. A few months later, a team of German, Polish and Jordanian scientists visited the mountain to survey the site and document the tracks.
“We found large trackways of several small- to medium-sized theropods, and also a few ornithopod footprints and one sauropod print,” says Henrik Klein, an ichnologist and paleontologist at the Palaeontological Museum in Germany. He participated in the expedition alongside Gerard Gierliński, a paleontologist at the University of Warsaw, and Abdalla Abu Hamad, a geology professor at the University of Jordan (…)