Fossil Tour Guide Discovers Giant, Purple Dinosaur Footprint While Walking Along a U.K. Beach

Joe Thompson was feeling “a bit down in the dumps” after one to two fruitless hours of searching for dinosaur remains along a beach on England’s Isle of Wight, as he tells Talker News’ Lauren Beavis. Then, he spotted an odd purple imprint that looked like the toe of a prehistoric footprint.

Thompson, a guide for the tour company Wight Coast Fossils, got to work uncovering his find, revealing a three-toed, roughly three-foot-long print, tinted purple against the red clay.

“[He] was out in the footsteps of early Cretaceous giants this morning on the island’s Wessex Formation coast, encountering this huge purple ornithopod dinosaur track in the ancient floodplain clays,” the company announced on Facebook on February 12. Thompson also works for his own tour company, called South Coast Fossils.

The footprint came to light after a storm washed away some layers of pebbles on Shepherd’s Chine, a beach on the island’s southwest coast. Thompson estimates it’s 130 million years old, according to BBC News.

The print “was left as a large ornithopod lumbered across boggy floodplain soil,” Wight Coast Fossils elaborates in the social media post. “The maker was likely a large Iguanodon or related species.”

Iguanodons were a type of ornithopod—bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs—that lived during the Early Cretaceous (110 million to 140 million years ago) in modern-day Belgium and the United Kingdom. They likely sported a large spike on each hand as well as a long tongue, grew to around 32.8 feet long and weighed more than 8,000 pounds.

“Iguanodons waked around in quite large groups of maybe 20 to 30, were quite large individuals and walked on all fours and ran on two feet,” Thompson tells Talker News. This supposed Iguanodon print, he adds, “is a bit younger than other footprints on the island.”

Nevertheless, “anything that’s that old and that exciting—it gives you such a rush, especially a huge, almost [one-meter]-long footprint just lying on the beach,” Thompson says to the BBC. “It just makes you think about everything that happened before humans even existed.”

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The beach’s clay gives this footprint a special trait: its color. The print’s purple hue comes from oxidization of minerals in the clay, as Wight Coast Fossils writes on Instagram.

Unlike fossilized footprints, clay footprints tend to erode quickly once exposed to natural elements, making Thompson’s finding one of many “ephemeral glimpses of an early Cretaceous world and its inhabitants,” per the social media post.

“We’ve found a good number of them over the years, but usually when you go back they’re gone!” the company says, as reported by the Miami Herald’s Mark Price. The clay print will likely disappear within a few months, Thompson tells the BBC.

The giant purple footprint is the latest of a host of paleontological discoveries made on the Isle of Wight, which is sometimes called “Dinosaur Island.”

“The Isle of Wight is one of the most important places in the U.K. for finding dinosaur fossils,” Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, says in a statement. In fact, in October 2023, engineering surveys stumbled upon 125-million-year-old prints likely belonging to a Mantellisaurus—a dinosaur once considered a species of Iguanodon that also lived during the Early Cretaceous Period.

During the Cretaceous, sea levels were lower than they are today, and the Isle of Wight was a green floodplain connected to England. There, floods buried dinosaur remains and protected them for thousands of years, as Jeremy Lockwood, also a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum, told Discover magazine’s Joshua Rapp Learn in 2023. Today, storms significantly erode the island’s cliffs, making it even easier to investigate its rich paleontological history.

The latest find is “probably the best footprint I’ve discovered myself,” Thompson tells the BBC.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.