High School Teacher Discovers First-Ever Adult T. Rex Trackway While Fossil Hunting In US

A Colorado high school teacher with a passion for amateur fossil hunting has made a rare prehistoric discovery in North Dakota. Kent Hups found what turned out to be the first-ever trackway of an adult T. rex while volunteering at a fossil dig in 2025, according to People.

Hups was volunteering on a dig in the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in southwestern North Dakota. The dig was led by his friend Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, according to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Hups believed he had found a T. rex footprint. At first, Lyson and others were not fully convinced. However, they returned the next day and confirmed that Hups had discovered not one, but four adult T. rex footprints.

Researchers estimate that the trackway was made around 66.5 million years ago. It is described as extremely rare and contains tridactyl tracks that are about 1 metre long.

The tracks stretch for about 23 feet and show that the adult T. rex was walking at an estimated speed of 3.4 to 4.5 miles per hour (5.47 to 7.24 kilometres per hour).

The researchers said the tracks were preserved as fine-grained sandstone concretions cemented with calcium carbonate. The footprint casts are harder than the surrounding rock.

Although the footprint casts have become heavily fractured and suffered other damage since the Cretaceous period, researchers said the discovery is an important record of a trackway likely made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex.

Lyson explained that bones reveal a lot about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of their behaviour. He said a trackway allows researchers to follow an animal as it moved across the landscape, which is incredibly rare for T. rex.

Hups, a teacher at Northglenn High School, also became a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology on September 8.

He said that as a teacher, he always tells his students that science begins with curiosity, passion and careful observation. He added that he never imagined these qualities would lead him to such a discovery.

Isolated footprints have previously been attributed to adult T. rex in New Mexico and Montana. However, researchers said this is the first time scientists have described a sequence of tracks, or trackway, likely left by the famous dinosaur.

Peter Falkingham, a professor of palaeobiology at Liverpool John Moores University and a dinosaur track expert, was the lead author of the study.