A Teacher Went Looking at Rocks and Found T. Rex History
Talk about a Back to the Future moment. Northglenn High School science teacher Kent Hups stumbled onto what researchers say is the first known trackway made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex while prospecting in the North Dakota badlands.
And this was not one random footprint getting thee Jurassic hype treatment. The trackway preserves four three-toed prints stretching roughly 23 feet, with a stride of about 13 feet. Researchers estimate the animal was moving somewhere around 3.5 to 4.5 mph — basically a brisk human walking pace, except the walker in question weighed several tons and had teeth the size of bananas.
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A T. Rex Took a Walk. Science Found the Receipts.
Go deeper into Kent Hups' remarkable discovery, then dig into the science and fossil history behind Tyrannosaurus rex.
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Four Footprints Just Gave T. Rex a Whole New Walk Cycle
Hups found the site in 2025 on U.S. Forest Service land near Marmarth, North Dakota, while working with a Denver Museum of Nature & Science team. What first caught his attention was a strange, raised shape in the rock that looked suspiciously like three enormous toes. Then came another one.
That matters because isolated T. rex footprints are already exceptionally rare. A sequence of prints is something else entirely: a trackway lets paleontologists study movement rather than just anatomy. Two left prints and two right prints preserve an actual stretch of one animal’s walk across the landscape some 66 million years ago.
Researchers used high-resolution 3D surface scanning to document the footprints and build digital models of the site. Because the tracks are weathered, the speed estimate remains approximate, but the spacing still offers an extraordinary glimpse at how an adult T. rex moved when it was simply walking rather than doing whatever Hollywood has one doing while chasing a Jeep.
The team says three of the footprints are expected to be recovered and transported to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for preservation and further research. Getting them out of the remote site is no tiny museum errand either: the planned recovery involves lifting the tracks by helicopter.
For Hups, the whole thing is also one hell of a classroom lesson. He has spent years telling students that science begins with curiosity and careful observation. Then he went into the badlands, looked closely at something odd in the ground and helped uncover a piece of T. rex behavior nobody had documented quite like this before.
Dig out all thee ferocious science brain-juice history. Sometimes the biggest discoveries really do begin with somebody stopping and saying, “Wait. What the hell is that?”
Watch 9NEWS Report on Kent Hups’ North Dakota T. Rex Discovery
The 9NEWS report follows Northglenn High School teacher Kent Hups and the first known adult T. rex trackway discovered in North Dakota.
Sources: Northglenn High School; Denver Museum of Nature & Science; Liverpool John Moores University; 9NEWS.
