More than a hundred million years before Bonnie Prince Charlie set foot on the Isle of Skye, escaping from the English after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden, dinosaurs were grazing on the northern coasts.
They left their footprints in the sandy bottoms of ancient brackish lagoons that then existed on the Trotternish Peninsula in the north of the island at a location known as Prince Charles’ Point. The rocks in that part of Scotland are known as the Great Estuarine Group, formed in the Middle Jurassic period around 167 million years ago.
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Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, led by Tone Blakesley, have been studying 131 recently discovered trackways made by various dinosaurs in the submerged waters of what were then subtropical lagoons. These were subsequently covered by layers of sedimentthat hardened, trapping the short stretches of footprints intact within. Wave action has gradually worn away the layers of sedimentary rocks at the shore to reveal their geological make-up and the footprints.
Dinosaur tracks are rare anywhere in the world, so these lines of prints are giving scientists important information about the everyday behaviour of certain dinosaur groups and how they were distributed in the landscape at an important time in their evolution. Although they are relatively short – the longest is just over 12m (40ft) – they are the longest continuous stretches of dinosaur tracks yet to be found on Skye.
The trackways reveal primarily two types of dinosaurs – large carnivorous theropods such as megalosaurus, that left three-toed clawed footprints, and equally large plant-eating sauropods such as cetiosaurus, that left flat circular prints the size of car tyres. The two species were clearly co-existing and wading around in the lagoons, although they appear to have had their own territories within the areas. The researchers describe the apparently slow-moving actions of the dinosaurs as “cumulative milling behaviour”, suggesting they were spending time in the lagoons, not just passing through.
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Unusually, compared to other groupings of dinosaur footprints in other locations, there were slightly more of the meat-eaters present on the Trotternish Peninsula than the slower, plodding sauropods. There are also no footprints of smaller species of theropod or sauropod, or other dinosaurs that paleontologists might have expected to be there: stegosaurs such as loricatosaurus and ornithopods such as iquanodon.
Conclusions are necessarily speculative, but it may be that the environment of the shoreline lagoons at Prince Charles’ Point had a greater proportion of freshwater. This has been inferred from the fossils of plant and marine life found there.
This is what may have attracted these two particular dinosaur groups more than others. What is certain is that the findings indicate that predatory theropods were more common visitors to coastal lagoons than had previously been thought, although why that might be has yet to be definitively established.
Top image: A new Middle Jurassic lagoon margin assemblage of theropod and sauropod dinosaur trackways from the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Credit: PLOS One (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0319862