![The First Adult T. Rex Trackway Ever Found](https://cdn.slatesource.com/4/1/7/417baaa6-cd94-4294-b80b-669752a81d59.webp) # The First Adult T. Rex Trackway Ever Found - [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/the-first-adult-t-rex-trackway-ever-found) - By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph) - Created on Sep 16, 2026 ## A High School Teacher Found Something Odd in the Badlands Four footprints. Each roughly one metre long and 80 centimetres wide. Each pressed into rock that formed 66.5 million years ago. And all four connected, meaning whoever made them was walking, not standing in place. Kent Hups is a teacher at Northglenn High School in Colorado. He was volunteering on a palaeontology dig near Marmarth, North Dakota in 2025, on federal land managed by the U.S. Forest Service, when he noticed them. He flagged them to Denver Museum of Nature and Science curator Tyler Lyson. Lyson brought in Peter Falkingham, a professor of palaeobiology at Liverpool John Moores University and one of the world's foremost experts on dinosaur tracks. The paper they published September 8, 2026 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology describes the first adult Tyrannosaurus rex trackway ever documented. [Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: "A large tridactyl trackway from the Upper \](https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2026.2706201?utm_source=slatesource) ![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/4/1/7/417baaa6-cd94-4294-b80b-669752a81d59.webp) ## Only Two Isolated Prints Existed Before Before this, exactly two confirmed adult T. rex footprints had ever been found anywhere in the world. One in New Mexico. One in Montana. Neither was part of a sequence. Neither showed anything about how the animal was actually moving. ## A 23-Foot Sequence at a Brisk Walking Pace What Hups found is categorically different: a connected trackway, 7 metres (23 feet) long, with four large three-toed impressions. Two left feet, two right. The average stride between them is four metres (13 feet). From that spacing, the research team calculated the animal was moving at between 1.5 and 2 metres per second, or roughly 3.5 to 4.5 mph. That is approximately the pace of a brisk human walk. The largest land predator that ever lived was in no hurry. The footprints are also unusually large even by T. rex standards, which narrows the identification further: only a fully grown adult would leave marks of this size in the surrounding Hell Creek Formation, a rock unit that has already yielded a high concentration of tyrannosaur bones. The same badlands produced "Teen Rex," a juvenile tyrannosaur discovered in 2022 by three boys on a family hike. > "Footprints capture a moment of behavior. With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T. rex." Tyler Lyson, Denver Museum of Nature and Science > > — Steph · 16th of September 2026 ## Why the Hell Creek Formation Rarely Preserves Tracks The Hell Creek Formation is one of the richest sources of Late Cretaceous fossils in the world, but its ancient streams and swamps were hostile to track preservation. Moving water routinely destroyed surface impressions before sediment could lock them in place. Finding any tracks at all in Hell Creek is exceptional. Finding a connected sequence of four is close to unprecedented. Falkingham, who is based in England, never saw the tracks in person. The Denver team used high-resolution 3D surface scanning in the field, then transmitted the digital models. "The technology we're able to apply in the digital age means my colleagues could scan the tracks in the field and then send the 3D information over to me to visualize on my computer and in VR, enabling me to take as close a look as they did in person," he said. ![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/4/1/d/41ddf333-aedc-41cb-951d-1d60de7ab9ee.webp) ## Credit: Bureau of Land Management (public domain). Researchers documenting \\ dinosaur tracks in the field. The 2025 North Dakota site was similarly scanned and documented in 3D before any physical recovery. ## What One Walking Sequence Actually Tells You A skeleton can tell you what an animal was built like. A trackway tells you what it actually did. The 13-foot stride of this T. rex places its walking pace at the lower end of large-theropod estimates, consistent with animals that conserved energy during long-distance movement rather than rushing. The regularity of the spacing also suggests the animal was not startled or injured: it was walking calmly across a surface that was, 66.5 million years ago, soft enough to take an impression and dry enough to preserve it. The tracks date to within the last several hundred thousand years of the Cretaceous period. An asteroid ended that period about 66 million years ago. Whoever made these impressions was alive close to the end. > "As a teacher, I'm always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation." Kent Hups, Northglenn High School teacher and trackway discoverer > > — Steph · 16th of September 2026 ## Three Prints Are Being Airlifted Out This Fall Three of the four footprints are expected to be removed from the site by helicopter in autumn 2026, a logistical operation necessitated by the scale and weight of the rock blocks containing them. They will be transported to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for study and eventual public display. The fourth print remains on federal land for now. The museum says it will share updates on the recovery with visitors through the winter. For the first time, the public will be able to watch a T. rex trackway recovery in real time. [Denver Museum of Nature and Science: home of the research team and destination \](https://www.dmns.org/?utm_source=slatesource)