Blethering Skite

Although globally scarce, Middle Jurassic dinosaur tracks are known from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and help indicate the palaeoenvironmental preferences and behaviour of major dinosaur clades. Here, we report an extensive new tracksite from Skye: 131 in-situ dinosaur tracks at Prince Charles’s Point on the Trotternish Peninsula.

In the Kilmaluag Formation at Prince Charles’s Point, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, we report and document 131 dinosaur tracks of Middle Jurassic age. These include tracks we hypothesised were made by a large megalosaurid and a non-neosauropod or basal neosauropod trackmaker. All traversed across a shallowly submerged lagoonal margin surface within a closed, ephemeral, freshwater (low salinity) lagoon palaeoenvironment, represented by a fine-grained rippled sandstone.

The trackmakers consistently walked in non-uniform directions, which likely represented cumulative milling behaviour rather than interspecies or gregarious interactions. The occurrence of these tracks in a lagoonal shoreline provides further evidence to the widespread habitation of sauropods in these palaeoenvironments on ancient Skye, as indicated by previous discoveries, and suggests that theropods may have been more common components of the lagoonal assemblages than previously recognised.