Scientists uncover first adult Tyrannosaurus rex trackway in North Dakota

Paleontologists have identified a four-print trackway belonging to a mature Tyrannosaurus rex in the Badlands of southwestern North Dakota, marking the first such discovery. The trackway, measuring about 23 feet in length, was reported in a paper published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It consists of four three-toed footprints, each roughly three feet long, and suggests the animal was moving at an estimated speed of 3.5 to 4.5 miles per hour despite a weight of more than seven tons.

The prints were found in 2025 on U.S. Forest Service land near Marmarth by Kent Hups, a high-school teacher and volunteer on a dig led by Dr. Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. > "Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior," Lyson said. > "With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T. rex."

Researchers assigned the tracks to T. rex based on their size, shape, and the surrounding rock’s abundance of tyrannosaur remains, including a juvenile specimen discovered nearby in 2022. The site was digitally scanned in three dimensions, and lead author Peter Falkingham of Liverpool John Moores University analyzed the data remotely. Three of the four footprints are scheduled to be airlifted to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science later this year.

The footprints date to approximately 66.5 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous period, representing one of the last known movements of the species before the mass extinction event.