Some 100 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the coast of the Tethys, an ancient ocean that covered most of the modern-day Middle East. Recently, dozens of their footprints have been found on the mountain of Safaha. In 2019, two Polish doctors stumbled across three-toed footprints while hiking between Shobak and the ancient city of Petra in the south of Jordan.
A few months later, a team of German, Polish and Jordanian scientists surveyed the site, on the arid mountain, to document the tracks.
“We found large trackways of several small- to medium-sized theropods, and also a few ornithopod footprints and one sauropod print,” says Henrik Klein, an ichnologist and paleontologist at the Palaeontological Museum in Germany. He participated in the expedition alongside Gerard Gierliński, a paleontologist at the University of Warsaw, and Abdalla Abu Hamad, a geology professor at the University of Jordan.
