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Ask anyone in the Badlands if they have a dinosaur story and they all do. Amateur digging and chatting about bones makes palaeontology a part of their lives.

These people accept their heritage and live amongst it. Get invited into their house for coffee and you'll soon be looking at prehistoric teeth, femurs, even jaw bones. So it is perhaps no surprise that after a four-hour drive (50km off road) we're summoned to a ranch because the owner believes she has T. rex prints out back.

After careful inspection, Dr Manning is not convinced. They look very similar and as a find are significant, but a few characteristics rule them out as our "shoes" - and our quest continues.

Dr Manning knows what he is looking for. With an international profile and a career spent excavating dino tracks, he is 70% certain that some of the footprints he looked at last summer are the real thing.

Prehistoric

I pick up my first one, part of the shell from a prehistoric turtle. This is one of those moments you only ever experience two or three times in your life. An excitement money cannot buy and for which words cannot do justice.

There's no shortage of bone either but surprisingly much of it is entirely worthless. It sits in the middle of nowhere, weathering away. This could be the real tragedy but then the land is so vast, treacherously dripping with rattle snakes and scorpions, making the risks of combing every inch of it an impossible task.

We drive for six hours into one of the most dangerous areas of the Badlands - a place known as Hell's Creek. The drive is so off-road that we pass though 50km of countryside guided by the tyre marks of a single vehicle - tyre marks left there from Phil's trip months earlier.

I am given a safety talk on how to handle myself outside the vehicle (I have a phobia of snakes - and it is highly likely I will see one). I have to stomp loudly and pray the rattlers are deterred by the vibrations from my boots.

Pawprint

We trek for 30 minutes to the suspected print. There is a silence in the air slightly broken by the ominous sounds of the snakes - panic and dehydration start blurring my vision.

At first I think I am staring into a pile of debris covered in branches and twigs but as we start to comb away the confusion something incredible starts to emerge.

Even to an untrained eye, this is unquestionably a "pawprint"; and there's no doubt that if this thing still roamed the Earth, we would live in fear of it.

As I take a step back and witness it in all its prehistoric glory - this huge forbidding footprint - somehow you just know the king of dinosaurs was here.

I cannot help but touch it; my hand is so small in comparison, it could fit in the print a dozen times over. I cannot wait to get home to tell this story - the day we walked with T. rex in the Badlands of Montana.