It can be difficult to clock the speeds of animals that lived over 66 million years ago. There’s no speedometer to know how fast they could run or even any muscular soft tissue to fully understand the anatomy of the most speedy predators. Still, paleontologists do have some ideas about how fast our favorite dinosaur predators could run.
The only direct evidence we have of dinosaur locomotion comes from trackways or the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs, says Scott Persons, an assistant professor of paleontology at the College of Charleston. From a well-preserved dinosaur footprint, you can get the dimensions of its foot, and from that, you can estimate the length of its leg and discern its stride length.
“This, combined with a lot of careful work done on modern-day animals and their running biomechanics, provides a pretty good estimation for how fast a dinosaur was when it was leaving those footprints,” says Persons.
