A perceptive diner has spotted dinosaur footprints in a restaurant in southwestern China, with an international research team confirming that they belonged to the sauropod—a long-necked and small-headed herbivore.
Hongtao Ou, a self-reported palaeontology buff, was having a meal at a restaurant in Leshan, Sichuan, when he found evenly divided craters on the floor and speculated that they might be dinosaur footprints.
“This person noticed around a dozen regularly spaced pits in the ground in the outdoor courtyard of the Garden Restaurant in Sichuan Province,” one of the researchers from the University of Queensland, Anthony Romilio, said.
It turned out they are the 50-60 centimetres (20-24 inches) long fossilised footprints of the sauropod that lived in the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs flourished around 100 million years ago….