New York (PTI): Researchers claim to have discovered the first dinosaur trail on the Arabian Peninsula -- tracks of a herd of 11 sauropods walking along a Mesozoic coastal mudflat in the Republic of Yemen.

"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. With this discovery, we have filled a blank spot on the dinosaur map," said lead researcher Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands.

The site preserved footprints of 11 small and large sauropods -- long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods -- travelling together at the same speed, the 'PLoS One' journal reported.

The rocks in which the dinosaur tracks are preserved are likely Late Jurassic in age, some 150 million years old.

"The tracks probably went unnoticed for so long because they were too big to be spotted by the untrained eye and were partially covered by rubble and debris," said Schulp who conducted the study with Ohio University paleontologist Nancy Stevens and Mohammed Al-Wosabi of Sana'a University.

"It's rare to see such a big example of a dinosaur herd. We really want to learn when did which dinosaurs live where, and why was that? How did the distribution change over time, why did one replace another and move from one place to another?" Schulp said.