Car-Sized, Meat-Eating Dinosaur Could Run Faster Than Usain Bolt

A new analysis of fossil footprints suggests that the 2-meter-tall, 4- to 5-meter-long carnivores that left them could run nearly 45 kilometers per hour, bolstering the evidence that at least some dinosaurs were speedy, agile hunters.

Written byChristie Wilcox, PhD

| 2 min read

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Reconstruction of an indeterminate theropod running on lacustrine sediments during low water timespan.

An artistic reconstruction of a theropod making the tracks studied

Image credit:Pablo Navarro-Lorbés

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When Usain Bolt set the world record for the 100-meter dash, his speed topped out at about 44.25 kilometers per hour. Some of Tyrannosaurus rex’s formidable cousins that lived on the Iberian Peninsula 120 million years ago could sprint just as fast, finds an analysis of fossil footprints published Thursday (December 9) in Scientific Reports. The findings build on similar analyses of footprints from North America.

“The image that we have of dinosaurs 30 years ago or so is changing,” lead author Pablo Navarro-Lorbés of the University of La Rioja in Spain tells The Wall Street Journal. “In the past we thought that they were lumbering animals not well adapted to the environment. Now we see that some are perfectly adapted to hunting and running.”

According to the paper, the tracks—one 5 footprints long, and the other 7—were laid during the early Cretaceous period (145 million–100 million years ago) by ...

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Meet the Author

Christie Wilcox, PhD
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Christie was a well-established science blogger and writer when she was awarded a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology with a specialization in ecology, evolution and conservation biology from the University of Hawai‘i in 2014 for her research on the genetics of lionfishes. A short two years later, she published her debut book Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, which received widespread acclaim, and after that, she fully left academia behind and established herself as a science writer and editor. She joined The Scientist in 2021 as newsletter editor and left as senior editor in 2023. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, the Northwest Science Writers Association, and the National Association of Science Writers.
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