Steven and I went for a three day trip to the Isle of Skye last weekend, and went to a beach near the village of Staffin called An Corran, made famous for not only being the oldest Mesolithic human hunter-gatherer site (~6500BC) on Skye, but also a place to see dinosaur footprints embedded in the rocks!
The footprints are around 160 million years old, and probably belong to a large predatory dinosaur similar to a Megalosaurus. A hilarious aside about Megalosaurus: part of a bone was recovered from Oxfordshire in 1676, where it was incorrectly assumed to be from a giant human. It was then described again in 1763 and called a Scotum Humanum when comparing its appearance to a pair of human testicles. Funnily enough the label was not considered to be a proper name for an animal..! In the 1990s a petition formally suppressed the genus name Scrotum in favour of Megalosaurus. (Read more at Wikipedia)
Here is a photo of one of the footprints at An Corran:
An here is a photo I took of what I believe to maybe be a footprint – we unfortunately arrived at high tide, covering most of the footprints. Confirmation bias or dinosaur footprint?
