A patron at a restaurant in China may be getting their future meals for free after they noticed that the establishment's outdoor courtyard actually sports a set of 100-million-year-old dinosaur footprints. The remarkable discovery was reportedly made last week at an eatery in the city of Leshan when a guest pointed to some odd impressions in the rock floor outside the building. Suspecting that the previously overlooked markings might be of some scientific value, the restaurant enlisted paleontologist Lida Xing from China University of Geosciences to examine the peculiar spots and he subsequently confirmed that they were, in fact, footprints that were left behind millions of years ago by a pair of sauropods.

The discovery is particularly fortuitous as the restaurant has only been in business for about one year and, prior to that, the site had been a chicken farm where the footprints had been covered by dirt which had kept the impressions remarkably well preserved. When the owner of the eatery was converting the site, he removed that protective layer, but rather than even the area with cement, he opted to keep the rocky floor untouched since he liked the way it looked. Amazingly, over the course of the last year, no one seemed to think the impressions were all that unusual, until the guest raised the matter last week.

To that end, Xing marveled that "when we went there, we found that the footprints were very deep and quite obvious, but nobody had thought about" the possibility that they could be significant. The ancient impressions are now surrounded by a newly constructed fence so that inquisitive restaurant patrons do not wind up damaging the site and the owner is even considering building some kind of structure to protect them even further. As for the patron who put the establishment on the proverbial map for its dinosaur prints, it's uncertain if they received any kind of reward for their attention to detail, though one wouldn't be surprised if their next meal, at least, is on the house.