Washington, May 25 (ANI): Palaeontologists from the Fundación Patrimonio Paleontológico de La Rioja, La Rioja, Spain, claim to have found evidence of a swimming dinosaur in a 15 metre long underwater trackway in the country’s Cameros Basin.

The team led by Rubén Ezquerra discovered 12 consecutive prints, which they said provided the most compelling evidence to date that some dinosaurs were swimmers.

The area is known for its abundance of terrestrial dinosaur trackways dating from the early Cretaceous 125 million years ago.

It is also the first long and continuous record of swimming by a non-avian therapod dinosaur, Ezquerra said.

According to Ezquerra, the trackway consists of six asymmetrical pairs of 2-3 scratch marks each.

Each set of scratch marks, preserved in a layer of sandstone, averages approximately 50 centimetres in length and 15 centimetres in width. The spacing between them suggests an underwater stride of 243-271 centimetres, Ezquerra said.

According to co-author Loic Costeur from the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes, Université de Nantes, France, the S-shaped prints paint a picture of a large floating animal clawing the sediment as it swam in approximately 3.2 meters of water.

Ripple marks on the surface of the site indicate the dinosaur was swimming against a current, struggling to maintain a straight path, Costeur said.

"The dinosaur swam with alternating movements of the two hind limbs, a pelvic paddle swimming motion. It is a swimming style of amplified walking with movements similar to those used by modern bipeds, including aquatic birds,” said Costeur.

The question of whether dinosaurs could swim has been researched for years.

However, until now, very little hard evidence pointed to that end.

As such, the new finding could in the “trackway at La Virgen del Campo could open the door to several new areas of research," said Costeur.

"New biomechanical modeling will increase our understanding of dinosaur physiology and physical capabilities, as well as our view of the ecological niches in which they lived,” he said.

The findings appear in the June issue of Geology, published by the Geological Society of America. (ANI)