Edward Simpson, a geologist at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have discovered claw marks of a 77-million-year-old dinosaur in the Dixie National Forest in Utah, US.

They discovered the dinosaur which may have been in the act of digging for mammalian prey. The fossils were found with in sandstone layers in southern Utah.  

“It appears a dinosaur was digging down and trapping rodent-like mammals in a similar way to coyotes hunting around prairie dog burrows today,” said Mr. Simpson.

The researchers suggest that as these fossils are so close together the dinosaurs might have been scrabbling down to prey on mammals.

The claw print indicates that the dinosaur was a maniraptoran theropod - possibly a raptor relative of Deinonychus or Velociraptor that stood roughly 3 feet tall and 6 feet long.

The marks were preserved as the sand was dumped onto the burrows during a flood.

It's often hard to capture the behaviors of dinosaurs in the fossil record to see what they were doing,” Simpson added. “This is one of the few examples where one might see the impact of their behaviors, which is really cool.”

The discovery and findings has been published in the August issue of the Journal Geology.