More than 160 million years ago, long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods lumbered through the ancient lagoons that dotted what is now Great Britain. Now, dozens of their footprints have been found on the forbidding, wave-pounded coast of Scotland's Isle of Skye.

Standing on Skye's rocky shores, you might mistake the huge footprints for tidal pools—except that on second glance, you'd see that the pools trace the toes and fleshy heels of dinosaurs.

“These tracks were sort of hiding in plain sight for years,” says University of Southern California paleontologist Michael Habib, who wasn't involved with the discovery. “It goes to show how sauropods are so much larger than everything else, that we field paleontologists are rarely looking for something of that scale