A Colorado high school teacher on a volunteer dig in North Dakota just made a discovery that stumped every credentialed scientist in the field.
Now crews are racing to airlift the evidence out by helicopter before winter seals it back into the badlands.
What this high school teacher found buried in that hillside has never been found anywhere on Earth – until now.
The Find That Stopped Science Cold
Kent Hups wasn't supposed to make history that day.
The Northglenn High School teacher was volunteering on a dig in the Hell Creek Formation – the same rugged North Dakota badlands where paleontologist Tyler Lyson had been hunting fossils for years – when he spotted something odd in the rocky terrain.
Three massive toes. Pressed into ancient stone.
Hups texted Lyson immediately.
Lyson's response was professional skepticism.
"Initially I wasn't convinced because it was only one print," Lyson told Fox News Digital.
Rocks erode into strange shapes.
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But Hups pushed him to keep looking.
"I thought, well, if there's three, that's a pattern," Lyson said. "If we can find a third print, then I'll be a true believer."
They started digging into the hillside.
Within 30 minutes, they found a third print.
"At that point, myself, Kent, who found the trackway – we were absolutely ecstatic," Lyson said.
What they had uncovered wasn't just a footprint.
It was a trackway – four connected, three-toed prints stretching more than 23 feet across the ancient rock, each one roughly three feet long, preserved in sandstone for 66.5 million years.
It was the first known trackway ever left by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex.
What These Footprints Tell Us That Bones Never Could
Scientists have pulled dozens of T. rex skeletons out of the ground.
Bones tell you what an animal looked like.
They don't tell you how it moved.
That's the breakthrough here.
The spacing between the four prints – two left, two right, with a 13-foot stride – lets researchers calculate exactly how fast this particular T. rex was walking when it pressed those feet into the mud 66.5 million years ago.
The answer: 3.5 to 4.5 miles per hour.
A brisk human walking pace.
A 17,500-pound apex predator out for what amounts to a casual afternoon stroll.
The discovery was published September 8 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and Liverpool John Moores University in England.
Lead author Peter Falkingham – a paleobiology professor in England – analyzed the entire trackway remotely using high-resolution 3D scan data.
He never set foot in North Dakota.
Why This Had Never Happened Before
Here's what makes the discovery genuinely staggering.
T. rex fossils are common enough that dozens of skeletons sit in museums worldwide.
But T. rex footprints? That's a completely different story.
Even a 17,500-pound predator stomping through mud doesn't guarantee those prints survive 66.5 million years.
The Hell Creek Formation – North Dakota's most celebrated fossil hunting ground – actually works against track survival: the ancient river channels and wetlands that once covered the area dissolved most impressions before sediment could lock them in place.
Before Hups stumbled across this hillside, science had confirmed exactly two isolated adult T. rex footprints in the entire world: one in New Mexico, one in Montana.
Neither showed how the animal was actually moving.
These prints survived because mineral-rich groundwater hardened the surrounding sediment into stone before the landscape could erase them – a geological accident timed just before the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaur age entirely.
The Hell Creek Formation rocks date right to that final chapter: 66.5 million years ago, the last moment before everything changed.
What Happens Next
The team returned to the site this summer and found something new while excavating deeper into the hillside.
A fifth track.
Lyson told Fox News Digital he has no doubt the hillside holds more tracks waiting to be uncovered.
This fall, crews will place three of the recovered footprints – each estimated to weigh between 800 and 1,000 pounds – into a helicopter net and airlift them out of the Badlands.
They'll go to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, where researchers plan to clean them carefully.
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Lyson is especially hopeful about what that cleaning might reveal.
He believes the tracks could contain preserved skin impressions – meaning scientists might finally get a detailed look at what the actual foot of a living T. rex looked like from the bottom up.
That's not a guarantee.
But it's a possibility that didn't exist before last year, when a high school teacher trusted his instincts in the North Dakota badlands.
The same area has already produced extraordinary discoveries – the "Teen Rex," a rare juvenile T. rex skeleton found by three boys on a family hike in 2022, was recovered just over ten miles from the new trackway site.
A tyrannosaur tooth fragment turned up less than half a mile away.
This stretch of North Dakota badlands keeps delivering.
And according to Lyson, they've barely scratched the surface.
Sources:
- Andrea Margolis, "T. rex Footprints Unearthed in First-Ever Discovery 66 Million Years After Creature Walked the Earth," Fox News, September 16, 2026.
- Tyler Lyson and Peter Falkingham, "A Large Tridactyl Trackway from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota, Likely Attributable to an Adult Tyrannosaurus rex," Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, September 8, 2026.
- "Scientists Uncover First Known Adult T. rex Trackway Dating Back 66.5 Million Years," Fox Weather, September 2026.
- "First-Ever Adult Tyrannosaurus rex Trackway Discovered in North Dakota Badlands," CBS News Minnesota/Valley News Live, September 10, 2026.
- "Paleontologists Discover First Adult T. rex Footpath," Popular Science, September 2026.