Experts in northeast England have found footprints of a crocodile-type creature said to have lived about 100 million years before the dinosaurs.

But now the sea threatens to wipe away the prints - the oldest discovered in Britain - by eroding the coastal rock on which they were found.Twenty prints, each about the size of a human hand, and a body drag mark of what is thought to have been a Temnospondyl, which lived more than 300 million years ago, have been found on the Northumberland coast.

"We tried to cut the prints out of the rocks with a saw, but the sandstone was too thick. The sea exposed them and now the sea is taking them away," said Dr. Maurice Tucker, a geologist at Durham University. "Erosion will destroy them within a year . . . However, now we know where to look we can search elsewhere in the hope of finding more. This was an exceptional and lucky find; 1873 was when the last prints like this were discovered in this region."

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