How an Unlikely Fossil Hunter Found a Tyrannosaurus Trail

After a knee replacement, high school teacher Kent Hups was looking for an easy path out of a narrow, rocky valley in the North Dakota badlands when he stopped walking and started to run. “I saw something sticking up out of the ground, and it looked really peculiar,” he says, “like nothing I’d ever seen before.” For someone who’s spent 30 years thinking about and searching for ancient footprints, the lumpy triangle on the undisturbed surface seemed to resemble three giant toes. The amateur fossil hunter was sure he’d found the rarest of dinosaur discoveries.

“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,” Hups says. So he rushed to text his buddy, Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist whose crew Hups was volunteering with that day: “Hey just found a t Rex footprint!!!!!!”

Lyson, a National Geographic Explorer who was digging a few miles away, responded with the same text he’d sent to Hups many times over their decade of friendship: “Send me a pic!”

Lyson's immediate skepticism came from the knowledge that scientists had only identified a total of two adult Tyrannosaurus rex footprints in the entire world, one in New Mexico and one in Montana.

Finding any dinosaur footprint is rare enough but especially so in the Hell Creek Formation, a geological layer that appears in several western U.S. states, including in Montana and in the North Dakota hills where Lyson was born and raised. His whole life has been walking this landscape and uncovering fossils. The region was once a forested floodplain laced with streams and swamps, so the Hell Creek mudstone and other soft sediments preserve bones well. The formation’s watery origins, though, mean that other vestiges of dinosaurs are isolated and unusual.

On that first day, Hups diligently noted measurements in his field journal and photographed the craggy wedge. In the local box canyons, cell service is as common as ice in July, which is, politely, nonexistent. He’d had to work for the first text, and he knew photos would never upload from the site. A few hours after his initial jubilation, Hups emerged on higher ground to transmit his visual proof. Yet Lyson maintained his suspicions, even as the whole fieldhouse buzzed around him that evening when Hups shared his full story and claimed he’d seen a second footprint.

Lyson knew that one print in the Hell Creek was unlikely, but two together—a T. rex trackway? That was absolutely improbable. Scientists had found a few trackways elsewhere, possibly from other tyrannosaur species and maybe even from a juvenile T. rex, but nothing from a full-grown "king of the tyrant lizards."

Hups retraced his own footsteps with companions the next day. “We’re looking at it,” Lyson says, “and I'm arguing with him because he’s already sold. One track, boom, T. rex, done. No, I want to see a pattern.” So Hups pointed to the second mound, more ambiguous than the first.

“Yeah, maybe it’s sort of looking like a track,” Lyson says of his reaction. “Could be, but I’m not overly convinced. I had one of my high school buddies out here with me, and so he’s like, ‘Tyler, what will it take to convince you that this is a trackway?’ I’m like, ‘Well, we’d need to find a third one,’ and I said, ‘right about here, if it’s a trackway.’ I made a little mark, and he digs, digs, digs.”

Clink. The pickaxe landed on stone, a shout from the past amid the dull dirt. Footprint number three. And then four. And, eventually, five, extending on a path out of the hillside, across 66 million years: the first adult T. rex trackway.

This past summer, photographer Alex Wenchel and I joined Hups and Lyson's science team to document the site. The hike to the area demanded focus. Our hats provided the only shade on the trail, a foot-wide thread in a landscape of lookalike hills and dead-ends.

Most often, the summer days are dry, and “the sun burns through you,” Hups warned us. The gray, popcorned surface crunched and crumbled. But with rain, Hups said, “you walk five feet, and you’re five inches taller and 50 pounds heavier” from the mud on your shoes.

We were already 50 pounds heavier with camera gear, plodding under a relentlessly blue sky. Our convoy rounded another lobe as we snaked through a dry streambed in a single file, and the sandy bottom reflected the heat from above. Finally, we crossed a flat plain into the natural cul-de-sac that harbored the remarkable series of fossils.

“It’s a really hard thing to excavate because it’s rock-on-rock, not rock-on-bone,” Lyson said as we dropped our bags and studied the scene. “And it’s weird, right? The trackway is weird because it’s 3D. It’s not an impression like the tracks we just made coming out here.”

Tens of millions of years ago, an adult T. rex walked on this spot. The multi-ton animal sank a little in the muddy banks, maybe as it stalked a worthy meal because prey was abundant here, as the fossil record attests. Triceratops bones are common in the area, and Lyson’s team spent the 2025 field season excavating a fully intact Triceratops head, neck, and chest they nicknamed Triceratops Dreams.

Yet scientists have uncovered only one other trackway in the Hell Creek Formation, and it’s not from either of these celebrated species.

So “why don’t we have Triceratops footprints?” Lyson asked us with a smile. The key factor is location. The dynamic riparian environment that would become the Hell Creek Formation regularly washed away prints. For this one exceptional instant, however, it retained the trace of a T. rex walking through—a deduction based on the stride length between its footprints, the type of active behavior impossible to see with an isolated track.

Lyson and his team hypothesize that after the animal thundered away, the three-toed hollows of its prints filled with warm, sandy water that likely contained bacteria. That organic-laden water allowed sediments and minerals to crystallize layer upon layer until a mix of calcium carbonate and sandstone solidified into a dense, unyielding cast in the surrounding mud.

“This one just happened to erode the most,” Lyson told us, pointing to the block that Hups had first seen, which resembled a solid T. rex foot with some squarish bits gone. Other scientists have referred to this kind of preservation as 4D, acknowledging the "temporal dimension of movement" added to length, width, and height.

We shuffled down the line, a step backward in time, to the second footprint, hidden by rock of the same type. “This one, you know, you’ve got a sort of a tri-radiate concretion,” Lyson said of the teardrop outline. We continued to the third, which had more definition at the edges. “This one you can really see it. This one even looks like it has a claw,” Lyson noted. The mid-morning sunlight slanted across the mold of a middle digit, and a vertical, convex protrusion that conspicuously echoed the impression of a long-ago toenail.

The phrase "footprints are not feet" is sometimes invoked in paleontology, meaning it’s difficult to prove which species left a certain mark. Still, the evidence for the trackway belonging to a T. rex was strong enough for Lyson and Hups to publish a new scientific paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology to officially establish their findings.

And if the size of the three-foot-long footprints doesn't alleviate doubts, the proximity of T. rex bones surely will.

Famed fossil collector Barnum Brown hauled out one of the first T. rex skeletons in 1902 from eastern Montana near the waterway that gives the Hell Creek Formation its name. More legendary T. rex specimens have been found in the region, including Sue—the largest, most complete skeleton on record that now dominates a hall at the Field Museum in Chicago. Two other notable skeletons, Stan and Gus, were unearthed in Harding County, South Dakota, about 75 miles south of here. That same county also produced the first Hell Creek trackway of any kind in the late 1990s, smaller prints preserved in the 3D like the ones we’re circling.

Closer to home, a little more than 10 miles from the trackway, Lyson and his team recovered what they call Teen Rex. The juvenile T. rex, first spotted in the soil by several kids, now lies in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, where Lyson is the senior curator of vertebrate paleontology. It’s across the room from Triceratops Dreams, which is still being actively prepared for its final display. A fragment of a tyrannosaur tooth rests on its lower jaw. These were found less than half a mile from the trackway.

The sun scorched us as we headed up and down and around the trackway again later in the week, carrying gallon jugs of drinking water for a longer stay. Wenchel envisioned an image that would reveal a harmony of deep time. A single photo that could, if successful, capture the imprints of both stone and starlight, an illumination that had once blasted from distant galaxies echoing the same moment the T. rex lifted its foot.

Lyson and his crew—museum staff and seasonal volunteers—had already helped us shuttle camera bags, tripods, and lighting equipment across the desiccated landscape, saving us miles and miles of exhausting effort.

Meanwhile, the field team was prepping several of the footprints for a move to the Denver museum. They gouged several feet of adjoining rock so the T. rex footprints would cap individual, free-standing pedestals. The transformation was impressive not only for the volume of earth moved by shovel and pick but also for the working conditions. A thermometer we brought along crested above 110 degrees in our corner of the Hell Creek.

Hups and his wife, Tracey, joined us for the overnight photo attempt before the site changed forever. A fiery evening palette faded in the sky as we shared melty peanut butter and drippy jam for a no-cook campsite dinner. When the bats finished feasting above us, all that was flying through the still valley were memories of what happened here a year ago.

“It’s kind of that elusive thing that you look for, and you look for, and you look for, and you can never find. I still to this day can’t believe that I found it,” Hups said, in awe at this turn his life had taken. “Everybody hopes that they find that thing: You find a complete T. rex, or you find something that is just incredible to see. But you never think you’re going to find something that is the only one in the world.”

He shook his head. “I never thought I’d find tracks in the Hell Creek, ever. They’re so, so, so rare.”

Bones are beautiful, he said, and “when you find a T. rex foot, and you look at a T. rex foot, it’s very impressive. But then add the meat, and the muscles, and the tendons to it, and then you start to see how big the foot really was. And that’s the thing about a track. You’re looking at the size of that foot. You’re not looking at bones and people drawing lines around it. You’re looking at how big that foot really would have been when it was walking.”

Branches of the Milky Way connected the silhouettes of the surrounding hills when we climbed into our tents after midnight, but clouds emerged to obscure the sky while we napped. We needed another try, so we hiked out for food and back in with more water.

That night, the primordial stars kept us company for the photo shoot all the way through to 4 a.m., when Wenchel shut down the camera, and I turned off the strobes. Dawn’s powdery blue filtered through the mesh roofs as we zipped our tents.

Lyson and the field team then arrived around 7 a.m. and began slicing burlap strips, smushing them into wet plaster, and smoothing a field jacket onto the third footprint to protect the claw impression. With quick, intense wrapping, the fossil disappeared into a fortified white eggshell to begin its journey.

They encased two more in the following days, because without conservation, the tracks would disintegrate. Instead, the team will carefully undo their work back at the air-conditioned museum as they grind and chip extraneous material to expose only the footprints. Future research might unveil T. rex’s biomechanics, foot anatomy, or even skin impressions. After all, any scientific answers feel attainable when the starting point was once thought impossible.