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It was 1982 and 22-year-old first-year Leicester University PhD student Julian Andrews was on a field trip to Skye’s rugged north coast.<\/p>\n
The young scientist was not looking for dinosaurs.<\/p>\n
He was seeking to better understand the environmental conditions the island’s ancient Middle Jurassic sedimentary rocks were formed in.<\/p>\n
“It was towards the end of the morning and, as you do when you are in the field, I walked away from where we were working to look at the whole context,” says Andrews, today an emeritus professor at the University of East Anglia.<\/p>\n
“I put my hand on a block of limestone, just to steady myself.<\/p>\n
“I looked under my hand and thought ‘Oh, that’s funny. There’s sort of a lump there’.”<\/p>\n
Seeing the shape of three toes he realised he had stumbled on a dinosaur footprint.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the trip, the scientist’s supervisor, John Hudson, had said no dinosaur fossils had been found on Skye – despite the rocks being the right kind for such finds.<\/p>\n
Prof Andrews said: “I went back to him and I said: ‘Did you say no-one’s ever found any dinosaur remains on Skye?’<\/p>\n
“‘Well, I think we have now’.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n