Yellowknife, N.W.T. - A scientist from the Royal Tyrrell Museum has confirmed the tracks found near the Hay River belong to a pre-historic animal but they aren't dinosaur tracks as some thought.

Donald Henderson visited the site earlier this week and says the tracks are between 360 and 380 million years old.

Henderson said that means the tracks predate the dinosaurs by 120 million years and were likely made by prehistoric lobe finned fish.

"They've actually got the equivalent of hips and bones in their fins exactly like our upper leg bones, upper arm bones, and then the para-bones like the shin and forearm. And many different kinds of these lobe finned fish were experimenting with living in the shallows."

Henderson said before he came up he was really sitting on the fence about whether the tracks were authentic.

"There was the potential. They're really hard to take photographs of and so the photographs suggested there might be, and now that we know that we've got real tracks, now we can see about getting a proper scaled map done."

Henderson has enlisted some enthusiastic Hay Riverites to make the map with diagrams and instructions from him.

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