Track of swimming dinosaur found in Spain

Madrid -- Scientists say a fossil line of tracks found in Spain is the first evidence that some dinosaurs could swim.

The trackway, about 15 meters (45 feet) long, was made about 125 million years ago. Six asymmetrical paired sets of scratches are preserved in sandstone, The Times of London reported.

Loic Costeur of the University of Nantes in France and his colleagues reported on the find -- at La Virgen del Campo in the Cameros Basin in northeast Spain -- in the journal Geology. The scientists said the scratches appear to have been made by the legs of a bi-pedal dinosaur as it swam in water that was more than 3 meters (9 feet) deep.

The scratches, in place of actual footprints, show the animal's weight was supported by the water and it was swimming, rather than wading.

"It was a large carnivore like the tyrannosaurs, though it wasn't actually a tyrannosaur," Costeur said. "The most abundant kind of predators in this area at this time were the allosauroids, so that's what we postulate it might have been."

Copyright 2007 by United Press International.