A High School Teacher's Knee Surgery Walk Led to History's First T. Rex Trackway

An Accidental Discovery in the Badlands

In 2025, high school teacher and amateur fossil hunter Kent Hups was recovering from knee replacement surgery while volunteering with paleontologist Tyler Lyson in the rugged badlands of North Dakota. Looking for an easier route out of a narrow, rocky valley, Hups noticed an unusual shape in the ground. He described seeing "something sticking up out of the ground" that looked "really peculiar." Having spent 30 years thinking about and searching for ancient footprints, the lumpy triangle on the undisturbed surface seemed to resemble three giant toes.

Hups believed he could see a second print nearby, suggesting this was not an isolated footprint but part of a trackway. "I got very excited, and the problem with being very excited when you're by yourself is that you can yell really loud, and there's nobody to hear it," he said. His excitement was justified. What he had stumbled upon would become one of the most significant paleontological finds in decades.

What Makes This Discovery So Extraordinary

Before this find, only two isolated adult T. rex footprints had ever been confirmed anywhere in the world — one in New Mexico and one in Montana. Neither showed how the animal was actually moving. A single footprint is a frozen instant. A trackway is something else entirely — it's a story.

While individual footprints have previously been attributed to adult Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, researchers said this is the first time a sequence of tracks has been described that likely belonged to the prehistoric apex predator. The approximately 23-foot-long trackway consists of four three-toed footprints discovered in the Hell Creek Formation of southwestern North Dakota, and each footprint is roughly 3 feet long. Researchers estimate they were made about 66.5 million years ago. The trackway dates to approximately 66.5 million years ago, placing it right on the eve of the Chicxulub asteroid impact that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.

Bones Versus Footprints — A Different Kind of Evidence

"Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behavior," said Dr. Tyler Lyson, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape." That distinction matters enormously to scientists. Skeletons reveal anatomy. Trackways reveal life in motion.

Based on the path, this particular dinosaur was not in a hurry. Researchers estimate the T. rex was walking at a pace of approximately 3.5 to 4.5 miles per hour — comparable to a brisk walking speed for a human. That represents a brisk human walking pace for a creature weighing more than seven tons — equivalent to the combined mass of two full-grown African elephants. The team used cutting-edge tools to document every detail. High-resolution 3D scanning technology was used to record the footprints, allowing researchers to digitally study the tracks and create physical replicas without disturbing the original site.

What Comes Next

The team of paleontologists is planning to excavate three of the four footprints and transport them to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science by helicopter. The findings were published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Kent Hups, the teacher who discovered the site and a co-author of the paper, reflected on the moment: "As a teacher, I'm always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation. I never imagined that could lead me to a discovery like this."

The find is a reminder that the most transformative scientific discoveries don't always begin in a lab. Sometimes they begin with a bad knee, an easier path, and a lump in the dirt that looks vaguely like three enormous toes. With the trackway now formally documented and specimens headed to Denver, researchers hope the data will reshape our understanding of how the most iconic predator in Earth's history actually carried itself — one deliberate, thunderous step at a time.