3-foot-long purple footprint found pressed in clay on coast of UK island, photo shows

A tour guide in the United Kingdom was confronted with something both rare and fantastical when he stumbled upon a 3-foot-long purple footprint pressed in coastal clay, a photo shows.

It was clearly a “huge” dinosaur track, but not quite a fossil.

What guide Joe Thompson found Feb. 12 on the Isle of Wight was much more fleeting.

“Revealed by shifting (gravel), this track ... was left as a large ornithopod lumbered across boggy floodplain soil,” the fossil-hunting company Wight Coast Fossils wrote in a Feb. 12 Facebook post.

“Unlike the resistant sandstone footcasts ... these clay tracks are often short-lived, being eroded away relatively quickly once exposed. They are amazing but ephemeral glimpses of an early Cretaceous world and its inhabitants, now lost to time.”

The print, found in the island’s Brighstone Bay area, was likely left by a large Iguanodon and the size implies the beast was about 32 feet long, the company said.

Iguanodons roamed 110 to 140 million years ago, and could walk on two legs or all fours, the Natural History Museum in London reports. They were herbivores and defended themselves with “a large thumb spike on the end of its hand.”

Their skull size suggests they had “a very long tongue,” the museum says.

Trails of fossilized Iguanodon prints have been documented in stone on the Isle of Wight.

Those prints found in clay are known to erode away in a matter of days or weeks — just like fresh animal tracks, the company says.

The fading starts as soon as an unpredictable shift in rocks suddenly exposes something hidden for millions of years.

“We’ve found a good number of them over the years, but usually when you go back they’re gone!” the company said.

This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 7:26 AM with the headline "3-foot-long purple footprint found pressed in clay on coast of UK island, photo shows."