WASHINGTON, July 24 (Xinhua) -- A study published on Tuesday in the journal PeerJ confirmed the largest dinosaur foot ever found and identified it as a brachiosaur, a type of sauropod dinosaur that was among the largest land animals on Earth.
According to the study, the fossils found in the U.S. state of Wyoming also revealed that brachiosaurs lived at a huge swath of North America 150 million years ago.
The big foot was excavated in 1998 by an expedition team from the University of Kansas including Anthony Maltese, who is working at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center now.
"It was immediately apparent that the foot, nearly a meter wide, was from an extremely large animal, so the specimen was nicknamed 'Bigfoot,'" said Maltese, the lead author of the study.
Maltese and his collaborators identified the foot as belonging to an animal very closely related to the long-necked, long-tailed sauropod Brachiosaurus, best known as the sauropod featured in the movie Jurassic Park.
They used 3D scanning and detailed measurements to compare the specimen to feet from numerous dinosaur species, confirming that this foot is the largest dinosaur foot discovered to date.
According to the study, brachiosaurs inhabited a huge area from the eastern part of state of Utah to the northwestern part of Wyoming, about 150 million years ago.
"This is surprising," said Emanuel Tschopp, a Swiss paleontologist working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "Many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time."