New dino foot study reveals

For the first time, we have shown that a soft heel pad was crucial to how sauropod dinosaurs supported their immense weight, according to a new digital reconstruction of their feet. Sauropods, which weighed up to 50 tonnes and dominated the world's ecosystems for around 100 million years, appear to have developed soft heel pads early in their evolution, and it was likely a key step that allowed sauropods to become the largest animals to have ever walked the earth.

Our work appears this week in the journal Science Advances. 'Thunder lizards' One of the most notable things about sauropods is the immense size of some species: the feet of sauropod dinosaurs would have shaken the earth as they walked. Indeed, the name of one of the first described sauropods to gain popular appeal, Brontosaurus, means "thunder lizard".

Sauropods had long necks and tails, and walked on four long, pillar-like legs, but they didn't start out gigantic. Around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of these dinosaurs were small, two-legged animals that would have looked very much like their saurischian cousins, the theropods; most probably wouldn't have weighed more than an ostrich. But starting around 210 million years ago, sauropod ancestors increased in size, with an estimated body mass approaching one tonne.