Source: CNN

By Joshua Berlinger

(CNN) The world’s biggest dinosaur footprint has been discovered in northwestern Australia, measuring at nearly 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 meters), the lead author of a study said.

The track belonged to a sauropod, a long-necked herbivore. It tops a record 1.15 meter-long (nearly 3 feet 9 inches) footprint found last July. That footprint, found in Bolivia, was the biggest ever from a carnivorous dinosaur.

“The giant footprints are no doubt spectacular,” Steve Salisbury, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Queensland, told CNN of the record-setting fossil. “There’s nothing that comes close (to this length).”

Richard Hunter lies alongside a 1.75 meter (5 foot 9 inch) sauropod track in the Lower Cretaceous Broome Sandstone, Walmadany area, Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia. The sauropod that made these tracks would have been around 5.4 meters (17 feet 9 inches) high at the hips.