A young girl has made a big discovery by finding a dinosaur footprint on a Welsh beach. Lily Wilder was walking along a beach near Barry in South Wales when she spotted the footprint, reports The Independent.
Scientists believe that the 220 million-year-old footprint could help us better understand how dinosaurs walked.
"It was on a low rock, shoulder height for Lily, and she just spotted it and said, 'look Daddy,'" Lily's mother Sally Wilder, 41, told NBC News on Saturday. "When Richard came home and showed me the photograph I thought it looked amazing.
"Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who took it from there."
Lily Wilder found the dinosaur footprint at Bendricks Bay - a beach known for its dinosaur footprints. But Lily's discovery is extraordinary even for a beach known for dinosaur footprints.
National Museum of Wales Palaeontology curator Cindy Howells described the find as "the best specimen ever found on this beach."
The footprint, just over 10 cm in length, is likely to have been made by a dinosaur that stood about 75cm tall and 2.5m long - although it is not possible to determine which dinosaur made the footprint 220 million years ago.
The fossil was extracted this week and taken to the National Museum Cardiff, where it will be preserved.
"Its spectacular preservation may help scientists establish more about the actual structure of their feet as the preservation is clear enough to show individual pads and even claw impressions," National Museum Wales said in a statement.
