As it turns out, "Bigfoot" was a dinosaur--a giant, plant-eating one. A new study based on fossils excavated in Wyoming reveals the largest dinosaur foot ever found and identifies it as a brachiosaur, a type of sauropod dinosaur that was among the largest land animals on Earth. The work, published today in the journal PeerJ, also confirms that 150 million years ago brachiosaurs called a huge swath of North America home. 
 
 "There are tracks and other incomplete skeletons from Australia and Argentina that seem to be from even bigger animals, but those gigantic skeletons were found without the feet. This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America," said co-author Emanuel Tschopp, a Theodore Roosevelt Richard Gilder Graduate School postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology and author on the new PeerJ study. 
 
 The foot was excavated in 1998 by an expedition team from the University of Kansas which included Anthony Maltese, now at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park, Colorado. 
 
 "It was immediately apparent that the foot, nearly a meter wide, was from an extremely large animal, so the specimen was nicknamed 'Bigfoot,'" said Maltese, lead author of the study. 
 
 Now, after thorough preparation and examination, Maltese, Tschopp, and collaborators have identified the foot as belonging to an animal very closely related to the long-necked, long-tailed sauropod Brachiosaurus, best known as the sauropod featured in the movie Jurassic Park. The researchers used 3D scanning and detailed measurements to compare the specimen to feet from numerous dinosaur species. Their research confirms that this foot is the largest dinosaur foot discovered to date. 
 
 The study also shows that brachiosaurs inhabited a huge area from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming. 
 
 "This is surprising," Tschopp said. "Many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time." 
 
 The rock outcrops that produced this fossil--the Black Hills region of Wyoming, famous today for tourist attractions like Deadwood and Mount Rushmore--hold many more fantastic dinosaur skeletons, says Maltese. The research team hopes to continue their studies on fossils from the Black Hills region. 
 
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 Other authors on the study include Femke Holwerda, a Ph.D.-degree candidate at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany, and David Burnham, a researcher at the University of Kansas. 
 
 Funding was provided through the Europasaurus-Projekt by the Volkswagen Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History's Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fund and Richard Gilder Graduate School. 
 
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 The Black Hills mountain range, which stretches from South Dakota to Wyoming, is known for its lush forests, scenic waterfalls, and dense, intricate cave systems. But 150 million years ago, humongous, long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods roamed there—and scientists just identified one of their colossal, fossilized feet. 
 
 
 
 The nearly complete foot fossil, made up of 13 bones, was unearthed in 1998 from a body of rock spanning multiple states called the Morrison Formation. That area has produced a wealth of dinosaur fossils from the Late Jurassic Period, or between 155 million to 148 million years ago. Scientists there have dug up diplodocuses, allosauruses, stegosauruses—the list goes on. The staggering amount of fossils there, compared to the available scientists to examine them, is why it took two decades to identify this massive foot. 
 
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 The foot seems to have belonged to some kind of brachiosaur that stretched 80 feet long, the researchers wrote in their paper published Tuesday in PeerJ. To figure that out, they used a 3D scanning technique to make computerized images of the foot bones, and compared them to other sauropod foot fossils. 
 
 “It very likely is a type of brachiosaur, the kind that got famous in Jurassic Park (and then got horribly murdered in Fallen Kingdom),” Femke Holwerda, a study-author and paleontologist at the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Geology, told Gizmodo via email. “The only problem is that feet can rarely be diagnostic down to species level, hence the assignment to brachiosaur and not to any specific species.” 
 
 The same dig site where this foot was unearthed in northeastern Wyoming also contained a separate, smaller, nearly complete brachiosaur, and a handful of other long-necked dinosaurs like diplodocuses and camarasaurs. The research team was surprised to see a brachiosaur that far north, because the animals had been thought to occupy much smaller, more southern chunks of land. 
 
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 “This brachiosaur showing up in Black Hills in Wyoming brings up some questions,” says David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas who worked on the paper. “Is it a different species than the brachiosaurs down south? Or maybe they were migrating north to south? It’s several hundreds of miles from where we thought these guys were, so we have a lot of new questions. It’s great—I welcome the new questions and opportunities for further research.” 
 
 Illustration: Nobu Tamura (Wikimedia Commons) 
 
 Still, the huge brachiosaur foot is notable for more than just its surprising location. At just under a meter wide, the researchers said it is the largest sauropod foot ever discovered. Philip Mannion, a paleontologist at Imperial College London who wasn’t involved with this discovery, agreed with that assessment. 
 
 
 
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 “The metatarsals do seem to be longer than those of any other known sauropod dinosaur, so in that regard this is probably the largest foot ever discovered,” Mannion told Gizmodo. “There are other species with feet that aren’t much smaller, though.” 
 
 
 
 Plus, as Mannion and the study authors point out, we’ve never found the feet of the world’s largest sauropods, the titanosaur and argentinosaurus, who would surely surpass this brachiosaur in foot size. We haven’t seen those dinosaurs’ feet yet because foot fossils are notoriously elusive, according to study author Anthony Maltese, a paleontologist at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado. Throughout history, they’ve had a much higher chance of being lost in waterways or eaten by scavengers because they’re so small compared to the rest of the animal. That makes the most recent discovery an especially exciting one. 
 
 “It’s great to finally have a brachiosaurus foot,” Elizabeth Freedman Fowler, a paleontologist at Dickinson State University who wasn’t involved with this work, told Gizmodo. “Getting a decently complete foot for any dinosaur is a lucky find. As we keep digging and finding more bones, we are getting an idea of just how huge each dinosaur species can truly grow. I think we are going to keep breaking the record for ‘biggest’ over and over for many years to come.” 
 
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 [PeerJ] ||||| The largest dinosaur foot ever found, belonging to one of the largest land animals this planet's ever seen, surely deserves the title "Bigfoot" more than Sasquatch. 
 
 Excavated in 1998 by an expedition from the University of Kansas, and described in a new study published in PeerJ – the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences, "Bigfoot" was discovered in the Black Hills area of Wyoming. Scientists determined the dinosaur — a very close relative of Brachiosaurus — had the biggest feet of any sauropod, and roamed the area 150 million years ago. 
 
 Crew member Anthony Maltese, who is also the lead author of the study, writes that the foot was nearly 1 meter wide. It didn't belong to the largest dinosaur ever discovered, the study said, but "Bigfoot" did have particularly large feet. 
 
 Maltese and his team of researchers from the U.S., Switzerland, and Germany have identified the enormous foot as belonging to an animal related to Brachiosaurus, a member of the sauropod family — you know, the dinosaurs with the long necks and tails. It's not only the largest sauropod foot ever identified, but also the first confirmed brachiosaur foot from the Late Jurassic period of North America. 
 
 A rendering of Brachiosaurus-araucaria, or "Bigfoot." Image: Davide Bonadonna 
 
 The Black Hills, famous for Mount Rushmore, were home to plant-eating giants like Camarasaurus and Diplodocus, some of the largest land animals that ever lived on Earth. 
 
 Photograph from the excavations in 1998, with the brachiosaur foot bones below a tail of a Camarasaurus. A University of Kansas expedition crew member is in there for scale. Image: KUVP archives 
 
 So, just how did the team connect "Bigfoot" to sauropods, and then determine it was, in fact, related to Brachiosaurus? Maltese and team members Emanuel Tschopp, Femke Holwerda, and David Burnham used 3D scanning and highly detailed measurements to compare the large specimen to various species of sauropod, including Camarasaurus and Diplodocus. 
 
 By comparing elements of the foot — like metatarsals and phalanges — with existing examples, the scientists determined it was neither of those two, but more likely that of a brachiosaurid. 
 
 And there's still plenty to discover. Maltese said in a press statement that the rock outcrops that produced this fossil hold many more "fantastic dinosaur skeletons," and that the research team will press on with their studies from there. 
 
 Personally, I'd like to know if "Bigfoot" sneezed as dramatically as the Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park. ||||| A photo from the 1998 excavation, with the brachiosaur foot bones below a tail of a Camarasaurus dinosaur. 
 
 While basketball player LeBron James' shoe size (15) is pretty big, it's nowhere near the considerable foot size of the dinosaur with the largest feet on record, a new study finds. 
 
 That honor goes to a long-necked dinosaur of "enormous proportions" that lumbered around about 150 million years ago in what is now Wyoming, the researchers said. 
 
 At nearly 3.2 feet (1 meter) long, "it is the largest dinosaur foot that was ever found, which must have belonged to one of the largest land animals ever," study co-researcher Emanuel Tschopp, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, told Live Science. [Titanosaur Photos: Meet the Largest Dinosaur on Record] 
 
 Researchers found the jumbo-size foot fossils in 1998, buried underneath the tail of a long-necked Camarasaurus dinosaur. These fossils are part of the Morrison Formation — a rocky expanse known for its Late Jurassic period fossils, especially its sauropods (long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that walked on all fours), such as Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus. Though the scientists aren't sure what species the fossils came from, it's likely a close relative of Brachiosaurus, which made a cameo in the 1993 film "Jurassic Park." 
 
 A Brachiosaurus nibbles from an Araucaria tree. These dinosaurs had enormous necks and relatively short tails. The newly described dinosaur was likely a close relative of Brachiosaurus. Credit: Copyright Davide Bonadonna, Milan, Italy 
 
 During the dig, the paleontologists found "several individuals of various ages and from at least three different species," Tschopp said. "This foot definitely belonged to the largest individual preserved in this quarry, but unfortunately, nothing else of it was found." 
 
 The foot — a left hindfoot — was so massive that the paleontologists from the 1998 dig nicknamed it "Bigfoot." But despite its gargantuan size, the foot hadn't been described in detail until now, said lead study researcher Anthony Maltese, curator of the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park, Colorado, who also took part in the 1998 excavation. 
 
 To investigate, Maltese and his colleagues used a 3D-scanning technique to take precise measurements of the mystery dinosaur's foot and then compared those with the foot bones of other sauropods. They found that the beast was closely related to Brachiosaurus and that it likely stood about a whopping 13 feet (4 m) tall at the hip. 
 
 Given the dinosaur's fantastic foot size, it's safe to call it a titanosaur — the largest group of sauropod dinosaurs — which includes the 122-foot-long (37 m) Patagotitan and the 115-foot-long (35 m) Argentinosaurus. 
 
 The newly described foot bones are slightly larger than those of the long-necked Giraffatitan sauropod dinosaur and "considerably larger than those of Dreadnoughtus, which was reported to be one of the largest sauropods ever found." Even so, it's by no means the largest dinosaur on record, the researchers wrote in the study. That's because foot size doesn't directly equate to body size. 
 
 "Some of the largest sauropods such as Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan do not preserve pedal [foot] material, but have femur lengths that considerably exceed our estimate for [the newly discovered dinosaur]," the researchers wrote in the study. For instance, the mystery dinosaur has an estimated femur length of 6.7 feet (2 m), while Argentinosaurus had a femur length of 8.3 feet (2.5 m) and Patagotitan's was 7.7 feet (2.3 m), the researchers said. 
 
 The finding also reveals that large brachiosaurs and their close relatives inhabited huge geographical swaths 150 million years ago, from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming. 
 
 "This is surprising," Tschopp said in a statement. "Many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas during that time." 
 
 The study was published online today (July 24) in the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences. 
 
 Original article on Live Science. ||||| This week, the American Museum of Natural History in New York will unveil its newest exhibit to the press: the skeleton of a huge plant-eating sauropod that many paleontologists think is the largest dinosaur ever discovered. The animal is new enough that it doesn’t yet have a proper scientific name — it’s being called Titanosaur for now. It is 122 feet long and 19 feet high at the midpoint of its back, a specimen so big that its head will peek out of the great hall of the Wallach Orientation Center and into the elevator bank on the fourth floor. Its dorsal vertebrae will brush the lofty ceiling. 
 
 But in the museum’s files is buried a description of a vertebra for a dinosaur that would have been 55 percent longer than the Titanosaur — and bigger than any animal ever known. The only problem: The vertebra described has been missing for more than 100 years, and many people think that it may never have existed at all, or at least not as it was described in the first place. 
 
 The missing dinosaur is known as Amphicoelias fragillimus, and the only recorded evidence of its existence — a piece of vertebra measuring almost 5 feet tall — is said to have been dug up just outside of Cañon City, a small town in central Colorado that for a few short years in the late 1800s was the dinosaur capital of the world. Along with dozens of bones from other dinosaurs, the partial vertebra is listed on the manifest of a freight train that went to Philadelphia, where it was first described and sketched in a paper by famed paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Around the time of Cope’s death in 1897, the Amphicoelias bone is said to have been sent with the rest of his massive collection to the American Museum of Natural History, where it was received and catalogued as FR 5777: “Amphicoelias fragillimus, Holotype.” 
 
 But when museum President Henry Osborn and his colleague Charles Mook finally got around to analyzing the collection more than two decades later, there was no Amphicoelias bone to catalog. In their exhaustive review of the sauropods of the Cope collection in January 1921, Osborn and Mook write, “The type of this species has not been found in the Cope Collection, and its characters cannot be clearly determined.” 
 
 It makes sense to be skeptical that an animal almost twice the length of a blue whale once roamed the American West. 
 
 A few months ago, I went searching for the truth about that missing bone. I was not the first — plenty of others have sought the largest dinosaur that has ever lived. What I found was a quest that has driven some people toward maniacal competition, some to conspiracy theories and others to disregard scientific consensus. It drove me to a little rocky outcropping on a hill in rural Colorado known as Cope’s Nipple. 
 
 My search started in Cañon City with Dan Grenard, a former Bureau of Land Management official turned amateur historian and paleontology enthusiast. Grenard is the kind of small-town resident who leads restoration projects, volunteers to share his knowledge with local middle-schoolers and knows pretty much everyone in the area. 
 
 When Grenard, a few others and I hiked into the hills behind Cañon City, we found the spot where Amphicoelias was likely uncovered. It was completely unremarkable. There was an ever-so-slight depression in the ground, and there were more light-colored rocks strewn about than in the surrounding areas. Melissa Smeins, who took over from Grenard as the Bureau of Land Management’s resident geologist, casually picked one up and handed it to me. “Dinosaur bone chip.” 
 
 Wait, what? 
 
 One hundred and thirty-eight years earlier, a seminarian-turned-teacher named Oramel Lucas had stood in the same spot — and also found bones. Lucas ran the one-room schoolhouse in the valley next to Fourmile Creek, which was a few miles north of Cañon City in an area now known as Garden Park. Lucas knew of other dinosaur digs going on in the area, but, as biologist Randy Moore writes in his book “Dinosaurs by the Decades,” Lucas may not have gone looking for them, instead simply stumbling across giant fossilized bones on a walk in the nearby hills. Whatever the provenance, he contacted one of his science professors at his alma mater, Oberlin College, who connected him to Cope. Lucas, it turned out, had wandered across a veritable Camarasaurus graveyard; over the next few years he’d pull six of these sauropods out of the 150-million-year-old green-and-red dirt layer in the hills known to geologists as the Morrison Formation. 
 
 Lucas’s biggest find, though, was yet to come. In 1878, Cope published a two-paragraph paper in The American Naturalist about it: “I have recently received from my indefatigable friend, Mr. O. W. Lucas, the almost entire neural arch of the vertebra of the largest saurian I have yet seen,” he wrote. 
 
 By that time Cañon City had changed. It had been a Western outpost where most townspeople worked as miners or shopkeepers and stagecoaches regularly rolled through the downtown strip bringing goods to the train station. In the 1870s, though, the cargo being transported shifted from ores to dinosaur bones as the town became ground zero for the growing rivalry between the two most famous men in paleontology: Cope and his rival, Othniel Charles Marsh. 
 
 This rivalry — now known as the Bone Wars — involved humiliation, bribery and eventually financial ruin for both sides. It also led to one of the most incredible periods of paleontological discovery in history, as the men’s rivalry led them to finance expeditions to the fossil bone beds of the West. Eventually, their teams identified more than 100 new dinosaur species, though many of those species have since been lumped together or otherwise revised. Amphicoelias fragillimus was one of the species discovered. 
 
 Marsh and Cope started out as friendly rivals, even naming new species after each other. Marsh was more academic and better funded — his millionaire uncle George Peabody built a museum at Yale for him — while Cope was more independent — he kept many of his favorite bones hanging in his Philadelphia house — and more prolific, cranking out more than a thousand academic papers. Cope eventually bought The American Naturalist to directly publish the notes on his finds. In Cope’s version of the story, their relationship soured when Marsh secretly bought bones from the workers at one of Cope’s quarries. In Marsh’s, the fallout happened after he publicly embarrassed Cope by pointing out that Cope’s Elasmosaurus reconstruction had its head literally coming out of its ass. Either way, the men went from sniping at each other to actively working against each other. At sites across the West, their workers were directed to sabotage one another, destroying rival camps, quarries and even bones. 
 
 Lucas’s findings didn’t go unnoticed by Marsh. As Lucas was shipping his first major haul out of the city, Marsh sent a Kansas professor named Benjamin Mudge to the area to persuade him to switch bosses. But Lucas was loyal to Cope, and thus the extremely large vertebra he found sticking out of the depression I was standing in was packed up and sent to Philadelphia. 
 
 One hundred and thirty-eight years later, I looked down at the rock Smeins had placed in my hand and saw that, yes — it was a dinosaur bone. There were little striations throughout the fossil, the telltale signs of carbon petrification. I looked around on the ground and there were little bits of dinosaur bone everywhere. Was I literally holding a piece of Amphicoelias in my hand? Who knows. As writer Brian Switek has explained, every paleo researcher is familiar with the feeling of finding a busted fossil. Where a beautiful bone once was, only unidentifiable fragments remain. Behold: the Chunkasaurus. 
 
 Grenard explained that the Amphicoelias probably existed a couple of million years after the other dinosaurs that were found there. That means that erosion exposed it first, and that many of the bones had likely shattered well before people could find them. Cope noted the thinning condition of the vertebra himself, calling the species fragillimus and noting that “much care was requisite to secure its preservation.” 
 
 Ken Carpenter, a short, stocky professor at Utah State University Eastern, spent 20 years trying to preserve something different: Cope’s discovery of Amphicoelias. In 2006, Carpenter tried to settle debate over the dinosaur by synthesizing his research in a paper titled “The Biggest of the Big.” It drew academic focus back to the dinosaur decades after it had been relegated to the sidelines. 
 
 For nearly two decades, Carpenter worked at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, leading a team in charge of finding fossils. In 1992, while surveying the Garden Park area with his research assistant, he stumbled upon a huge find in a riverbank — a nearly intact Stegosaurus skeleton, one of the few that has been found. 
 
 The Stegosaurus made Carpenter a star in the paleontology world, but he was interested in an even more elusive quarry: Amphicoelias. He acknowledges that it’s most likely that the vertebra and any other Amphi bones have turned into Chunkasaurus, but he still spent years researching the animal and even more time combing the Colorado countryside looking for more Amphicoelias bones. When his traditional searches came up empty, he decided to bring in a ground-penetrating radar — generally used by excavation crews to make sure they don’t hit sewer lines — to see if he could find any bones still hiding under the surface. It was useless, since the fossils and rock matrix the bones are encased in turn out to have the same density. “It turns out it was nothing like ‘Jurassic Park,’” he says. 
 
 Carpenter, now 66 and silver-haired, was a little grumpy when I prodded him by phone about the big dinosaur; he says he has moved on from his monomaniacal pursuit of Amphicoelias. He now spends his field time looking for prehistoric mammals in northwestern Utah and calls the argument over the largest dinosaur a paleontological “dick-measuring contest” that he’s not interested in participating in. When I told him I may have been holding a piece of Amphi bone in my hand, he was unimpressed. “A bone fragment’s a bone fragment’s a bone fragment,” he says. But once I got him talking about his research into Amphi and the incredible lengths he went to to try to find more, he perked up and started getting excited, even wistful. 
 
 In his paper on Amphicoelias, Carpenter tried to synthesize everything known about the animal so far. He even reconstructed the missing bone out of plastic foam; after adding the missing parts, he had a vertebra that was more than 8.5 feet tall. Expanded along the dimensions of a Diplodocus skeleton, that results in an animal that’s 190 feet long. For comparison, blue whales can measure up to 100 feet long. “I’d like to model the entire skeleton,” he says. “But that’s still a pipe dream.” 
 
 ANIMAL LENGTH Amphicoelias fragillimus 190ft Titanosaur 122 Blue whale 98 Brontosaurus excelsus 72 Giant squid 59 Tyrannosarus rex 39 Triceratops horridus 26 African elephant 23 Stegosaurus stenops 21 Sources: Ken Carpenter, American Natural History Museum, The Princeton field guide to dinosaurs, national geographic 
 
 It makes sense to be skeptical that an animal almost twice the length of a blue whale — and more than 50 percent longer than any other known sauropod — once roamed the American West. For a long time, many in the paleontological world believed that it never existed at all, and that it was simply a fish tale Cope used to gain prestige in the ongoing battle with Marsh. But the fact that, as far as we know, Marsh never once took the opportunity to question the finding is instructive, as he would have loved to have more fodder to fight his rival. And although Osborn, director of the American Natural History Museum, bemoaned the missing bone in his survey of Cope’s collection, he was convinced it had existed. 
 
 Modern skeptics are less likely to believe that Amphi was fake than to believe that something else fishy was going on. Cary Woodruff is one such skeptic. He’s an adjunct instructor of earth sciences at Montana State University who specializes in studying sauropod vertebrae, and he’s not convinced that any dinosaur can get get much larger than 100 feet long. Early last year, in a paper titled “The Fragile Legacy of Amphicoelias fragillimus,” he and his co-author John Foster argue that not only is the Amphi bone likely just part of a Diplodocus specimen, it wasn’t even that big. Based on the other measurements in Cope’s notes — and the fact that Cope was notoriously careless in his rush to get out papers — they argue that the most likely explanation is that a typo changed the height of the vertebra from 1050 mm to 1500 mm, which would make it about a foot and a half shorter. “People have been working in the Morrison for 130-plus years, continuously,” Woodruff told me. “We have never found a single scrap of any other bone that’s even close to the size of what Amphicoelias is reported to be.” 
 
 Woodruff doesn’t think that Cope was trying to deceive anyone when he made his measurements, but that he realized soon after that his sizing was wrong. Woodruff’s theory? Cope wasn’t interested in being humiliated again as he was with Elasmosaurus, but he also didn’t want to perpetuate bad science. So he simply stopped talking about the great beast after his two-paragraph description in The American Naturalist. That would explain why Cope never mentioned Amphi in his later writings, even in his papers about evolution and larger body size that eventually became known as Cope’s Rule. 
 
 Carpenter disagrees, calling Woodruff’s theory of a cover-up a “pretty harsh accusation for a kid standing on the shoulder of a giant.” 
 
 And there’s another person who thinks the idea of a supersized sauropod may not be wrong out of hand: Nathan Myhrvold, the polymath CEO of Intellectual Ventures and former CTO of Microsoft. Myhrvold has recently turned his attention to dinosaur size. (In previous years, it’s been on cooking and nuclear power.) In a 2013 PLoS paper, he argues that most of our current size estimates of dinosaurs are wrong for two reasons: The first is that paleontologists aren’t great at using stats to approximate animal size from bone measurements. The second is that most of the individuals that scientists are using as prototypes for their species weren’t fully mature. “Unfortunately the specimens that have the most complete skeletons are not the very biggest ones,” Myhrvold told me over email. “I think that at some point we will find new specimens of enormous sauropod, and hopefully will have enough material to settle the matter. But even then, we may find scraps of something that might be even bigger.” 
 
 In the meantime, a small stream of large-dinosaur sleuths continue to make the trek to New York to see if there are any Amphicoelias clues at the American Museum of Natural History. Mark Norell, the current head of paleontology there, tells me that the big bone room was cleaned and recategorized eight years ago, so it’s impossible that the 5-foot-tall bone is in there. But he’s willing to leave a slight opening that it’s somewhere: “If you have a collection like ours — we’ve got nearly a million specimens — it’s like running a library. Things just disappear. Sometimes they show up years later.” 
 
 There’s a precedent for that. In 1998, a few amateur dinosaur hunters, including Jack McIntosh, a physics professor at Wesleyan who died last month, persuaded the museum to let them check out Cope’s files. Although Osborn and Mook had claimed there were no other records from the digs at Cañon City, McIntosh found several letters between Cope and Lucas, as well as Cope’s field notebook from a trip to Cañon City in 1879. In it was the first description of exactly where Amphi was found — Grenard and I used those notes to find the spot on Cope’s Nipple. 
 
 But those notes didn’t help us find more Amphicoelias specimens. So, after a long day out dinosaur hunting, I headed back to my hotel in Cañon City, the Quality Inn & Suites, and walked over to an alcove in the lobby next to the stairs. There, in the corner, was Carpenter’s reproduction of the Amphicoelias vertebra, mounted just like the other biggest dinosaur in the world, Titanosaur, minus a few hundred bones here and there. The model was too big to fit in his office, and the Denver Museum didn’t want it. So, thanks to a favor from a friend of Grenard’s who runs the hotel, it resides in the alcove, confusing tipsy guests on their way out of the bar for a smoke. It’s not the American Museum of Natural History, but for now, it will have to do. 
 
 CORRECTION (Jan. 11, 8:14 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the tech company Nathan Myhrvold once worked for. He is the former CTO of Microsoft, not IBM.
– "Bigfoot" has been found, just not the apish version. An international team of paleontologists has announced the discovery of the largest known dinosaur foot, which belonged to a close relative of the Brachiosaurus now dubbed "Bigfoot." Appropriately so, as a nearly complete left hind-foot fossil totaling 13 bones, found two decades ago in the Black Hills area of Wyoming alongside separate and smaller brachiosaur remains, shows the 80-foot-long sauropod had feet that were about 3 feet wide, report Live Science and Gizmodo. "There are tracks and other incomplete skeletons from Australia and Argentina that seem to be from even bigger animals, but those gigantic skeletons were found without the feet," researcher Emanuel Tschopp explains in a release. Described in journal PeerJ, "this beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America." Researchers, who compared the foot to those of other dino species, believe it came from a brachiosaur that lived 150 million years ago, making it the first brachiosaur foot known to come from North America's Late Jurassic Period, per Mashable. Though it's not enough to identify a specific species, it's evidence that brachiosaurs covered a larger area of North America, from eastern Utah to northwestern Wyoming, than previously known. "This is surprising" as "many other sauropod dinosaurs seem to have inhabited smaller areas," Tschopp says. Noting the discovery occurred "several hundreds of miles from where we thought these guys were," fellow researcher David Burnham will look to answer new questions: "Is it a different species than the brachiosaurs down south? Or maybe they were migrating north to south?" (These tire-sized dino prints hid in plain sight.)