Found: One Very Big Foot

Apparently, this is the summer of Bigfoot news. Generally, cryptids stay on the margins of public consciousness, but this one is having a moment. The East Coast Bigfoot Researchers Organization hosted its first conference early in July, Bigfoot, the Musical premiered in Las Vegas, and Whitehall, New York, declared Bigfoot the town’s official animal.

But there’s a new type of Bigfoot edging in on the spotlight—one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, which has been named after the legendary Sasquatch. Bigfoot the Dinosaur left behind footprints more than three feet wide.

When this footprint was discovered in 1998, in the Black Hills of Wyoming, not much else was known about this dinosaur. Now a new paper in PeerJ reports that it would have belonged to a Brachiosaurus-like creature that once lived in the area that’s now eastern Utah up through northwestern Wyoming.

This particular specimen would have been “a dinosaur of enormous proportions,” the researchers report. Its hip would have been about 13 feet tall. That makes it the largest specimen found in this particular geologic formation. Some dinosaurs found elsewhere in the world would have been larger overall, but their feet weren’t preserved. This is the largest dinosaur foot anyone’s ever found—a very, very big and very, very real foot, by any standard.