Some 200 dinosaur footprints from the Late Cretaceous period have been discovered in an area measuring less than 100 square meters in a village in East China's Fujian Province, which the local team of scientists has termed "dinosaur dance floor", China News reported on Monday. Photo: CCTV

Some 200 dinosaur footprints from the Late Cretaceous period have been discovered in an area measuring less than 100 square meters in a village in East China's Fujian Province, which the local team of scientists has termed "dinosaur dance floor", China News reported on Monday. 

The massive concentration of footprints suggests that dinosaurs paid frequent visits to the area, which suggests it could have been a pathway for their roaming activities or that there had been water sources nearby, said Xing Lida, a paleontologist at the China University of Geosciences and a member of the research team. 

The newly discovered tracks are also bigger than those found earlier. They include imprints left by large sauropods, a kind of herbivorous creature with a long neck and tail, and a body as long as 20 meters.

Smaller dinosaurs were also found, whose footprints measure less than 10 centimeters, Xing noted. They belong to a category of bird-footed dinosaurs about one meter in length.

The footprints were first spotted in November 2020 when over 240 fossilized dinosaur footprints were identified, and another 364 dinosaur tracks were found in early April.

Global Times