Ancient creature stomped through Alaska — and researchers just found track to prove it

A titanic track found at a remote Alaska national monument is the first evidence that Tyrannosaurus rex once roamed there, park rangers say.

“RAWR!” rangers at Katmai National Park, which also oversees Aniakchak National Monument, wrote on Twitter with a photo of the footprint.

“If you had seen this, would you have recognized it as a track?” rangers wrote. Researchers knew that dinosaurs once lived in what is now Alaska, but the footprint provides the first evidence that T. rex was among them.

Aniakchak National Monument is “one of the most wild and least visited places in the National Park System,” rangers said.

It surrounds the Aniakchak volcano on the Aleutian Range of south-western Alaska.

Nearby Katmai National Park contains fossils of “plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates” spanning millions of years, the park said.

Many of the fossils are found in the Naknek Formation, the park’s largest largest geologic formation, which dates back the Jurassic era.

But the formation also includes fossils from the Cretaceous era, similar to those found of duck-billed dinosaurs in Aniakchak National Monument.

This story was originally published November 28, 2022 at 1:35 PM with the headline "Ancient creature stomped through Alaska — and researchers just found track to prove it."