Colorado teacher discovers first known trackway of adult Tyrannosaurus rex

A science teacher from Colorado has discovered the first known trackway of an adult Tyrannosaurus rex, a find that could reveal new details about how the massive predator moved. Kent Hups, who teaches at Northglenn High School, found the series of footprints in the badlands of North Dakota in 2025. The discovery is detailed in a study published in September in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, for which Hups is a co-author. The excavated prints were unveiled last week at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

"It's kind of been a roller-coaster ride," Hups told CBC Radio's As It Happens. "It's been unbelievable. It's a dream come true." Hups said he had long dreamed of finding a T. Rex bone, but instead found something much rarer. Dinosaur paleobiologist Jordan Mallon, a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa who was not involved in the study, said T. Rex fossils are common but their tracks are strangely rare. "But this is the first genuine T. Rex trackway, which is pretty cool," Mallon said.

The seven-metre trackway consists of four three-toed footprints, each nearly a metre in length. Hups found them in the Hell Creek Formation, a rock formation dating to the Cretaceous period. He said the reddish-brown colour amid white and gray rock first caught his eye. "And then I saw the three toes," he said. "And that's when I knew, well, I've got a track. And I've been doing it for a while, so I know how rare tracks are, but I never thought I'd ever have a T. Rex track, ever."

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Hups and his co-authors identified the prints as belonging to a T. Rex based on their size, shape and proximity to other T. Rex fossil discoveries. "Are we 100 per cent sure? No, we don't have a dead T. Rex at the end of the trackway. But we do have these things that really, you can't argue with," Hups said. "The size, the stride, the narrowness of the trackway. Everything fits. And it can only fit with the T. Rex because that's the biggest thing that's out there."

Mallon said trackways offer information that bones cannot. "Bone really represents a dead animal, but a track represents what an animal was doing while it was alive," he said. He is particularly interested in whether the tracks can indicate the creature's speed. "There have been, you know, study after study now trying to model T. Rex biomechanics and model how quickly they moved [and] could they run or not," Mallon said. "But ultimately it's the tracks that are going to tell us what actually happened."

Initial analysis estimates the animal had a stride of approximately four metres and was walking at about 5.5 to 7.2 kilometres per hour. According to the Denver Museum, that pace is roughly comparable to a brisk human walk. Before excavation, scientists took high-resolution 3D surface scans of the prints to create a digital reproduction for further study. Hups said he hopes scientists will be able to extract a skin sample from the tracks. "It's like a Christmas present," he said. "You don't know what you're gonna get until you open it up."

One of the four footprints will remain on public display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science through the end of next year. At the unveiling, Hups showed the print to a young girl who was so grateful she hugged him. "You could see the wonder and the excitement," Hups said. "That's your ultimate ending is to have that in a place where people can look at it, and it's there for research. It's protected."

With files from CBC News