After 20 Years, the Largest Dinosaur Foot Ever Discovered Has Been Identified

In 1998, paleontologists unearthed a fossil in Wyoming that experts agree is still the largest dinosaur foot ever discovered. Comprising 13 bones, the nearly complete fossil is 3 feet wide. And researchers say they've finally figured out who it belonged to.

As Gizmodo reports, the massive foot was likely that of a brachiosaur that roamed the Black Hills mountain range 150 million years ago. Brachiosaurs were sauropods that used their long necks to reach vegetation growing up to 40 feet off the ground. They could grow 80 feet long and weigh 88 tons.

The process of identifying the foot, which researchers explain in the journal PeerJ, took so long only because paleontologists in the West are digging up more fossils than they have time to study. When they finally got around to examining the foot bones, they made CGI models of them with a 3D scanner and compared them to other known examples of sauropod feet.

Though they're confident the foot comes from a brachiosaur—any member of the genus Brachiosaurus—scientists haven't been able to link it to one specific species.

This may be the biggest foot fossil ever found, but that doesn't necessarily make this species of brachiosaur the dinosaur with the largest shoe size. Foot fossils are rare: Because they're smaller and they're extremities, feet are more likely to be washed away or picked off by scavengers than other parts of the body. So while titanosaur and argentinosaurus, the largest known dinosaurs, almost certainly had more colossal feet than this brachiosaur, their actual foot fossils have yet to be discovered.

[h/t Gizmodo]