Sometimes science advances because somebody takes the easier route.
In 2025, high-school teacher and longtime fossil hunter Kent Hups was recovering from knee-replacement surgery when he chose an easier path through the North Dakota badlands.
There, he noticed three enormous toes protruding from the rock.
They turned out to be part of the first known trackway likely left by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex: four footprints, each roughly three feet long, preserving a 66.5-million-year-old walk.
The dinosaur appears to have been moving at about four miles per hour.
Hups’s shortcut earned him co-authorship on the scientific paper.
There is, apparently, such a thing as taking the right wrong turn.
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