Hold on to your butts…

Some of the largest footprints known to science were made 70 million to 90 million years ago, when a type of dinosaur believed to be a titanosaur galumphed across the muck in central Asia.
—Ben Guarino, The Washington Post

And that enormous foot left quite the impression.

“The footprint is one of the biggest known footprints in the world,” said Shinobu Ishigaki, a researcher at the Okayama University of Science in Japan and a member of the joint Mongolian-Japanese expedition to the Gobi, in an email to The Washington Post. The researchers announced their discovery of the footprint, roughly the size of a popular IKEA kitchen table, on Friday in Japan.

(Courtesy Shinobu Ishigaki/Okayama University of Science. Professor Shinobu Ishigaki lies next to a dinosaur print in the Gobi Desert)

As I’m writing this blog post on a kitchen table from IKEA, the picture above really hits close to home.

Joyous discoveries like the one made by Professor Shinobu Ishigaki is a great reminder of the wonder of this world, particularly with what roamed the Earth long before us. Thankfully, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg brought dinosaurs to life beyond the dusty pages of a book sitting on the shelf in 1993. Our minds have been blown ever since. Yes, being hunted by two velociraptors in a kitchen would be absolutely terrifying. Still, there’s a significant part of you that wants to be in Jurassic Park when watching the movie. The adrenaline to understand the known (and ironically unknown) characteristics of dinosaurs is what fuels our universal love and curiosity for the prehistoric creatures. That feeling is clearly expressed in Professor Ishigaki’s face in the picture above from a footprint left tens of millions of years ago.

What would it be like to witness a footprint the size of an IKEA kitchen table being made at the point of impact?

Jurassic World: You’re up.

Clever Owen.