Dispatch: a teacher spots the first known trackway of an adult T. rex in North Dakota. The verdict: the tyrant was out for a brisk walk.

Dispatch, we have the king of the dinosaurs on a stroll. A set of footprints in North Dakota has given scientists the first known trackway belonging to an adult Tyrannosaurus rex, The Independent reports. The prints were first spotted by Kent Hups, a high school science teacher volunteering on a fossil dig in the Hell Creek Formation, during an expedition led by Dr. Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Four footprints span seven meters, each about a meter long, with 13-foot strides. From the spacing, researchers figure the animal was moving at 1.5 to 2 meters per second, roughly a brisk human walk. So the most feared predator in the museum was, on this particular day, ambling. Isolated adult T. rex prints have turned up before, but a full trackway lets scientists study foot placement and stride length for the first time. "Bones tell us an enormous amount about these animals, but footprints capture a moment of behaviour," Lyson said. "With a trackway, we can actually follow an animal as it moved across the landscape. That is incredibly rare for T. rex." The tracks survived because soft mud filled the prints and hardened into three-toed sandstone casts that now stick out of a hillside. The site sits about 33 meters below the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and dates to 66.5 million years ago, shortly before the asteroid impact believed to have ended the age of dinosaurs. Researchers suspect a fifth print is still buried, waiting for erosion to expose it. "As a teacher, I'm always telling my students that science starts with curiosity, passion and careful observation," Hups said. All those years in the ground, and it took a science teacher looking hard at a slope. Somewhere a class just got a very good lesson. Over.