A Colorado high school teacher with a passion for amateur fossil hunting has made a rare prehistoric discovery in North Dakota. Kent Hups found what turned out to be the first-ever trackway of an adult T. rex while volunteering at a fossil dig in 2025, according to People .
However, they returned the next day and confirmed that Hups had discovered not one, but four adult T. rex footprints. Hups believed he had found a T. rex footprint. At first, Lyson and others were not fully convinced. He added that he never imagined these qualities would lead him to such a discovery. Peter Falkingham, a professor of palaeobiology at Liverpool John Moores University and a dinosaur track expert, was the lead author of the study.
Hups, a teacher at Northglenn High School, also became a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology on September 8.
researchers said the discovery is an important record of a trackway likely made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex Although the footprint casts have become heavily fractured and suffered other damage since the Cretaceous period. He said that as a teacher, he always tells his students that science begins with curiosity, passion and careful observation. However, researchers said this is the first time scientists have described a sequence of tracks, or trackway, likely left by the famous dinosaur.
Isolated footprints have previously been attributed to adult T. rex in New Mexico and Montana.
