The tracks were found in Africa and South America - 3,700 miles apart - and provide evidence of the last place dinosaurs were able to travel between before the two great continents split.
In a remarkable feat of sleuthing, a team of palaeontologists have found exactly matching dinosaur tracks in Brazil and Cameroon - before plate tectonics moved the two land masses apart. Today, the two countries are separated by around 3,700 miles of open ocean.
More than 260 footprints were discovered by the researchers, who say that the tracks belong to a type of Early Cretaceous dinosaur. The find pinpoints where land-living dinosaurs were last able to cross between Africa and South America before the continents started to split around 140 million years ago.
The footprints, impressed on top of thin sandstone strata interbedded with silt and mud, were made 120 million years ago on a single supercontinent known as Gondwana, explains Louis L. Jacobs, a palaeontologist from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas and lead author of the study.
"One of the youngest and narrowest geological connections between Africa and South America was the elbow of northeastern Brazil nestled against what is now the coast of Cameroon along the Gulf of Guinea," says Jacobs. "The two continents were continuous along that narrow stretch, so that animals on either side of that connection could potentially move across it."