Illustrations of how a camelotia may have looked like are rare, but experts think it closely resembled the massospondylus, shown here.
Schoolgirl's dinosaur footprint find on Vale of Glamorgan beach - BBC News
Ten-year-old Tegan went looking for fossils on a South Wales beach with her mother, Clair, and found something completely unexpected - a set of footprints made by a massive dinosaur 200 million years ago.
These have been identified by dinosaur expert, Cindy Howells, from the National Museum Wales, as almost certainly the tracks of a sauropodomorpha. The tracks were in a red sandstone 'pavement' on the beach at Lavernock Point between Cardiff and Barry on a stretch of the Glamorgan Heritage Coast known to be a prehistoric hotspot.
The sauropodomorpha group of dinosaurs includes the sauropod family which includes the brachiosaurus and diplodocus, characterised by their long necks and tails, large body and small head. The particular species is probably a camelotia which were widespread in Europe at the time.
Although fossils of camelotia have not been found in South Wales, they have been found in England on the other side of the Bristol Channel. It would have been about 3 metres tall and 4-5 metres long. It would normally have been bipedal but walked on all fours when grazing.
The fossil skeleton of a different species of dinosaur, the carnivorous Dracoraptor hanigani (a relative of the Tyrannosaurs) was found on the same beach in 2014 when it 'fell out of the cliff face', and a 220-million-year-old footprint of that species was found by a 4-year-old Lily Wilder at nearby Bendricks Bay, in 2021.
Creationists are guaranteed to lie about or misrepresent these finding but what they can never do is explain how dinosaur footprints in mud or sand survived a catastrophic global flood that covered Earth to a depth in excess of 29,000 feet. In fact, the footprints were almost certainly formed in sand which later became red sandstone.
Artist's impression of what South Wales would have been like in the late Triassic.
220 million years ago, the part of the world that is now South Wales was once a hot desert subject to flash flooding, but as continents began to break up and sea levels changed, by about 200 million years ago, the climate was more like the Mediterranean today with warm, shallow seas and islands, and more favourable for large dinosaurs.
The best time to find dinosaur tracks is when the sun is low putting the shadows into relief, or just after high tide when the prints may appear as small puddles.
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