You don’t see the bones right away.
The footprints are what it is.
The rock on a dry hillside in La Rioja, northern Spain, looks like someone hit pause on a stampede millions of years ago. Long, rounded holes that used to be mammoth feet. Three-toed, narrow marks where dinosaurs walked. A group of Spanish scientists stands quietly around them, holding tablets and waiting for the 3D scanner to finish its slow, buzzing sweep.
They’re here to answer a question that has been hiding behind every museum skeleton and every big prehistoric movie.
How quickly did these giants really move?
When scientists slow down the speed of giants
If you ask most people to picture a dinosaur moving, they’ll think of something from an action movie. Clouds of dust. Heavy footsteps. A blur of teeth and muscles. We think of dinosaurs as fast-moving monsters and mammoths as unstoppable furry bulldozers that run across the Ice Age plains.
Spanish scientists are now slowly, almost politely, putting a stop to that fantasy. Their fieldwork on fossil tracks all over the Iberian Peninsula shows that many of these giants walked more like careful hikers than fast Olympic sprinters. The stone doesn’t lie, and what it’s whispering is that things are slower, heavier, and more measured than we’ve been told.
At first glance, one of the trackways near the village of Enciso doesn’t look like much. A line of three-toed dinosaur footprints, each about the size of a dinner plate, going straight across what was once mud. But when the Universidad de La Rioja team ran the numbers, which included measuring the length of each step, the depth of each footprint, and the distance between each step, they found something else.
This dinosaur, which was probably a mid-sized theropod, wasn’t running after food. It moved at a speed of about 6 to 8 km/h, which is about the same as a fast human jog. That’s more like a weekend runner than a cheetah. Mammoth tracks from another site nearby told a similar story: a huge animal, yes, but it moved at a dignified, energy-saving pace over long distances, not a constant gallop.
It’s surprisingly easy to understand why these new speed estimates are what they are. When big animals move, they use a lot of energy. Their tendons, muscles, and bones are under stress that doesn’t change with size. From a distance, “slow” may look like the only way to walk without hurting yourself. Researchers in Spain used classic biomechanics formulas and high-resolution scans of trackways, making changes for body size and hip height.
What they found goes against decades of wilder claims that were based on rough measurements or pure imagination. Many ‘fast dinosaur’ headlines came from maths that was too sure of itself and footprints that weren’t well-documented. With better tools and a more cautious approach, the speeds get smaller. The animals don’t lose their cool. They just become real.
How scientists in Spain read speed from stone
At first, the method looks like it doesn’t use much technology. A researcher kneels next to a footprint, puts a folding ruler along the edge, and counts out loud. Length. Width. Depth. How far away is the next print? The site has that organised chaos feel of any field project: cables, laptops under sun hats and drones charging from a car battery all around them.
Then the more advanced technology comes into play. The cameras take hundreds of pictures from all angles that overlap. Software stitches them together to make 3D models that are so detailed that you can zoom in on tiny cracks and see how the animal’s weight pressed into soft mud. After that, the team uses biomechanical equations that have been tested on living animals, from birds to elephants, to figure out the hip height, stride, and gait.
One common mistake, which the Spanish teams also made at first, is to be drawn in by the longest tracks. Big strides look impressive, so it’s easy to think of them as sprints. But long legs naturally make long strides, even when you walk slowly. A giraffe can cover more ground in one step than a person who is running as fast as they can.
That’s why researchers like Pablo Navarro and his team check different clues against each other. Are the toes digging in sharply, like something is pushing off hard, or are they flatter, like a steady walk? Is there slipping in the mud that looks like a sudden burst or a clean, repeating pattern? They’d rather guess that speed is lower than it really is than go after another shaky “super-fast dinosaur” claim.
The new Spanish work also points out a subtle bias in how we’ve talked about prehistoric animals. For a long time, popular science thought that everything big must have been scary and fast. That gets people to buy tickets and click. But the tracks suggest a world where you had to pace yourself to stay alive, not run out of energy in a 30-second chase.
One researcher from Madrid told me, “Our results don’t make dinosaurs boring; they make them real.” If a 20-ton animal ran like a racehorse, it would probably break its own bones. The tracks show an ecosystem where energy was valuable and movement was planned.
The main method is to carefully measure stride and 3D scan the tracks.
Important point: Movies make it seem like bigger animals move faster and more efficiently than they do.
Key change: From fast-paced, adrenaline-filled chases to a more peaceful, long-distance view of life in the past.
Why slower dinosaurs and mammoths change everything
It’s strange how comforting it is to learn that mammoths walked slowly and dinosaurs often walked. The old world starts to feel less like a horror movie that never ends and more like a hard, quiet drama about staying alive over time. Herds slowly moving across what is now Spain. Lone predators walk around, watch, and carefully choose when to use their short bursts of speed.
*Once you see that, the old posters of angry animals running all the time seem a little too much.* The Spanish data makes us think about times when not much was going on, like walking, eating, and breathing. Prehistory goes from being a show to something more like everyday life, but with much bigger neighbours.
We’ve all been there, that moment when a childhood memory starts to fall apart because of new information. You might have liked the parts where raptors raced at motorway speeds or mammoths charged like tanks. To be honest, no one really checks the science behind those when they’re eight.
These Spanish studies don’t tell you off, though. It’s more like a soft reframe. You don’t have to stop being amazed. You can just move it to the engineering miracle of bones that could hold so much weight, the way muscles and tendons worked together, or the patience of animals that lived by saving energy instead of wasting it.
There’s another twist here that will hit home for anyone who cares about climate change and extinction. Mammoths and many big dinosaurs had to move slowly and steadily across large areas to find food and water. Their slower top speed may have made them more vulnerable when things changed quickly, like when new predators, including humans, showed up.
The Spanish teams show us that speed isn’t the only thing that matters.
“A palaeontologist told me, “Being fast helps for a few seconds, but being efficient helps for a lifetime.”
Change of point of view: Instead of monsters chasing at full speed, animals are optimising energy over long distances.
The lesson that isn’t obvious is that prehistoric extinctions weren’t just about violence; they were also about not being able to change how people moved and migrated.
Takeaway: Our culture of rushing might have more in common with bad dinosaur science than we want to believe.
A slower past, and what we do with it
When you start to think of mammoths and dinosaurs as slower, more careful animals, other things change too. Museum halls don’t feel like battlefields anymore; they feel more like giant stills from a long, unfolding journey. Those Spanish footprints on quiet hillsides are like pictures of normal days, when the big news wasn’t a chase but just that a herd crossed a river without getting stuck.
The research doesn’t take away the magic of the past. It changes it to a lower gear, where the miracles are in staying strong, not in explosions.
You might even feel like these results are a strange echo of your own life. It sneaks into everything from our workouts to our inboxes when we feel like we have to move faster, respond faster, and do more. Seeing how the greats of the past did well by taking their time and respecting the limits of their bodies and landscapes is a quiet counter-argument to the cult of speed.
Spanish scientists didn’t mean to write a self-help book. But their careful readings of those old tracks end up giving them a gentle reminder: those who take their time often live longer.
You might feel a little curious the next time you see a dramatic dinosaur picture or a thundering mammoth animation. How quickly was it really moving? What would the tracks say if we could stand there with a ruler and a 3D scanner? The new story starts with that little pause and that question.
The rocks under Spanish skies are quietly changing our favourite ancient stories. And they want us to take our time and read the fine print.
| Main Point | Detail | What the Reader Gets Out of It |
|---|---|---|
| New speed estimates | Spanish researchers use 3D track scans to show many dinosaurs and mammoths moved at steady speeds | Helps separate movie myths from scientific evidence and better understand how these animals truly lived |
| Energy over show | Large animals likely preferred efficient fast walking rather than constant running | Offers a more realistic and detailed view of prehistoric ecosystems and survival strategies |
| Rethinking “fast = strong” | Slower, sustained movement could still support survival and long-distance success | Encourages reflection on our modern obsession with speed and performance |
Questions and Answers:
Did dinosaurs really move slower than they do in movies?
Yes, a lot of trackway studies in Spain and other places show that the average speed of walking and running was lower than in big movies, especially for big animals.
How do scientists figure out how fast a dinosaur or mammoth was moving?
They figure out how fast someone is walking or running by measuring the size, spacing, and depth of their footprints and estimating the height of their hips.
Does this mean that dinosaurs weren’t dangerous hunters?
No, they could still be deadly, but they probably used short bursts of speed and careful planning instead of long, fast chases.
Are all species now thought to be slow?
Not at all; smaller, lighter dinosaurs probably moved faster, but the claims that dinosaurs were the fastest are being changed to be less extreme.
Why are these Spanish studies important for everyone?
They change how we think about prehistory by giving us evidence and a more detailed, relatable story of how big animals actually lived and moved.
