The giant fossilized footprint of a Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in a remote part of Alaska near a giant volcanic crater.
On Monday, Katmai National Park (KNP) announced that the dinosaur track had been found in the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. This area spans more than 600,000 acres in southwestern Alaska’s Aleutian mountain range and includes the eponymous volcano Mount Aniakchak—a caldera measuring around six-miles-wide.
The Aniakchak monument, which is administered by KNP, is one of the most wild and least visited places in the entire National Park System thanks to its difficult-to-access remote location and challenging weather conditions.
While it was already known that dinosaurs roamed this region, the recently discovered footprint is the first evidence that T. Rex lived here, officials said. “While we already knew dinosaurs roamed this land, this is the first evidence of T. Rex we have found,” it said in a Tweet.
T. rex was one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs to walk the Earth, standing up to 20 feet tall and measuring as much 40 feet in length. The iconic dinosaur, which walked on two legs, had a large, heavy skull, small forelimbs and a relatively long tail that acted as a counterweight.
T. Rex lived in North America in the final stages of the Late Cretaceous period (around 100.5 million to 66 million years ago). It disappeared around the end of this period amid a mass extinction event caused by a giant asteroid impact, which is thought to have resulted in the disappearance of all non-avian dinosaurs.
The dinosaur lived in western North America, with T. Rex fossils having been found in Northwestern states such as Montana and South Dakota, as well as Alberta, Canada.
T. Rex was an apex predator that research indicates could consume around 500 pounds of meat in a single bite of its powerful 4-foot-long jaws, which featured an array of razor-sharp, serrated teeth.
“It would have been the top predator of its time, and has been estimated to have had one of the strongest bite forces known among any terrestrial carnivore,” Thomas Cullen, a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Carleton University and research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History, previously told Newsweek.
The bite force of the T. Rex was so strong that it would have been able to pierce or crush the meat and bones of virtually any unfortunate animal it decided to feast on.
“It bit with about three times the force of really large crocodiles or great white sharks and about 60 times our bite force,” Casey Holliday, a researcher from the University of Missouri, previously told Newsweek. “We know T. Rex could break the bones of other large dinosaurs—like Triceratops—thanks to fossilized remains of bones that have bite marks and fractures. It’s amazing how strong these animals were.”
Dinosaur fossils have been found across Alaska—particularly in places such as Denali National Park and the North Slope—but there are very few fossil records of these ancient animals in the Alaskan Peninsula, a strip of land where the Aleutian mountains lie which extends for about 500 miles from the southwestern part of the state.
But despite the paucity of dinosaur fossil discoveries in the Peninsula, one study published in 2019 identified numerous dinosaur tracks in the Aniakchak National Monument.
At the heart of the monument is Mount Aniakchak—a roughly six-mile-wide, 2,000 foot deep volcanic caldera that was formed by the collapse of a pre-existing 7,000-foot tall mountain around 3,500 years ago after a catastrophic eruption.
There is evidence of several eruptions occurring at Aniakchak in the past few thousand years, with the most recent—and only one in modern recorded history—taking place in 1931.