Legend once had it that the huge, three-toed footprints scattered across the central highlands of Bolivia came from supernaturally strong monsters — capable of sinking their claws into solid stone.

Scientists dispelled those fears in the 1960s, determining that the strange footprints belonged to gigantic, two-legged dinosaurs that stomped and splashed more than 60 million years ago in the ancient waterways of what is now Toro Toro, a village and national park in the Bolivian Andes.

Now a team of paleontologists, mostly from California’s Loma Linda University, have discovered and documented 16,600 such footprints left by theropods, the dinosaur group that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex. Their study, based on six years of field visits and published last Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, r

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